Its
2006 and you have made a few resolutions. You need your website
to perform so that you reap the rewards. This article will be
more useful to companies who have a web based business or a portal.
Does this sound familiar:
1. We have a website and have spent a lot of money but it’s too
clunky.
2. It served us well when we had a tight budget and needed to
have a website but its not performing.
3. The development company that built the website for us told
us they could do all these wonderful things but left the site
incomplete.
4. Our competitors have mastered the web business even though
we can out beat them with our marketing and reputation.
5. When ever we ask the developers to add new features or functionality
they turn around and claim it cannot be achieved or that was not
the scope of the project.
The list can go on and on but if the above are statements that
you have said or heard and you need to break free then read this
article and let me know if it was useful.
When a business on the web is built. It is built to serve a target
audience. It is built to serve a need in the marketplace. If the
website was formed out of an idea and you were not sure if the
idea would be worthwhile then the reason you are reading this
is because your website and idea were worth the effort. You built
the website for your visitors and not for yourself.
The decision to do something with your website or web portal needs
to be after a full in depth analysis from someone other than yourself.
The reason for this is because it allows you to get an unbiased
opinion. The first steps before approaching someone to analyze
your website is to list the objectives of this exercise. To help
you with this process I have tried to list the questions I would
ask myself
1. What’s the purpose of this website?
2. Is this website an information site or a transactional site?
3. The visitors who would like visiting this website would be
IT savvy or not?
4. Has the website in its current state received a lot of visitors?
5. Have I received feedback from my clients or visitors about
the site?
6. Have I analyzed the behavior pattern of my web visitors?
7. Am I IT savvy?
8. What websites do I find usefull and user-friendly?
9. Are any of these websites close to being my competitors?
10. What features and aspects of my competitor’s site do I like?
11. What I want the website to achieve?
12. How much am I willing to spend?
13. Do I have time deadlines and if not make it a point to have
a time deadline.
Deciding if the site needs to be redeveloped or tweaked
After having listed the answers to the above questions you should
either request or appoint an expert to give you an unbiased opinion
of your website or decide that you do not need to do much about
your website. If you do go ahead to get an in-depth report check
to see if their report points out any of the following:
1. The site has usability problems
2. Information or content on your site is hard to find
3. Actions that need to be performed on your site are not performed
by visitors as they do not understand these actions or find it
too difficult.
4. The design is too cluttered
5. Users are not following a certain navigation path that you
wish them to take
6. Pages take too long to load
7. Search engine optimization has not been catered for
8. Navigation flow on the site is not planned out well. This is
crucial not only for a human to navigate through your site but
also from a search engine point of view.
It is important to realize that your present website may not need
a complete rework if the business goals are to simply make the
site design to look good. If however you want all aspects of your
website to function and in it’s current state they do not function
then you probably have answered your own question. Yes its time
to have a budget and plan in place to move forward.
Once you have got your report you need to take time out to analyze
the situation before making the final decision
Goals from a Visitor point of View:
You goal should be to have your visitors
1. Find what they want easily
2. Get what they want easily
3. Easily perform the appropriate actions that you want the visitors
to perform.
To accomplish this, the website needs to have:
1. An excellent navigation system.
2. The website should be user friendly. For example, does the
website have a natural flow while placing an order or does it
make it difficult for a visitor to handle this process.
3. The most important actions should be accessible within one
or two clicks.
Goals from a Search engine point of View: Please note the below
points are a rough guidelines as this topic is vast.
Flash : If your website presently uses a lot of flash consider
the following before making a decision to redesign or redevelop.
Most search engines cannot read text inside a flash animation.
If core elements of your site such as your navigation menus are
in flash you need to rethink about this. Consider a site whose
navigation menus are all in flash. A search engine would not effectively
index the pages on the site as it cannot read the flash links
to each page. That is unless you also provide a duplicate navigation
system without flash.
Incorrect or poorly structured HTML: If you are not very IT savvy
and do not understand HTML. It is wise to have the HTML code reviewed
roughly to check if there is any incorrect HTML code or overlaps
as this has a negative affect on your search engine ranking. This
can also confuse search engines.
Java Script: Again while most search engine can read java script,
they cannot cause the javascript functions to activate. This can
have a negative impact if your site navigation system is javascript
based with no alternative. It is safer to have text links then
have buttons which depend on Java script as otherwise your navigation
links may be hidden to a search engine.
There are many other important factors such as: The use of frames
or IFrames; Cross browser compatibility, Huge blocks of encrypted
viewstate text at the beginning of each page; etc…
Making a decision to have the complete website redone is a tough
decision as you need to have the right developers who understand
your needs and not theirs. I have noticed many companies after
realizing that the first development cycle was not the best they
go about redeveloping the website by what I consider patch work.
Patch work can be affordable if the site does not have major errors
or shortcomings, but if it does it is advisable to have the application
redone or implemented using other off the shelf packages. The
rationale to this is that you have a website already which needs
to be improved so a development company or a developer can have
a better understanding of what you require and the dos and don’t
for your business. It is important to remember that especially
in the case of website re-development it is the quality of the
work that matters and not the size of the development team. A
development company with a good project manager and true geeks
in the development team is one that will get you places.
I hope the information here was useful is some way. If you make
up your mind to do something about your website spend your budget
wisely by first listing the objectives the site needs to perform
for the next 2 years and what functionality is the bare necessity
and what functionality is a nice to have. Speak to your existing
clients and do not waste too much time in planning that the cost
of planning exceeds the actual cost of implementation.
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Good luck and all the best for your mission.
Zuricka
Dot Net Web Design and Development
by Zap Strategy
Outsource Web Design and
Development to NewAge Web developments
