Making Your Site Easy to Use
Here is an invaluable exercise to go through as you create your web site. I do this religiously. It’s time to play the “who do you know” game.
If you want to sell to dentists, who do you know that is a dentist? Is your target small business owners? Who do you know that’s a small business owner?
They don’t have to need what you have to offer right now. You are not going to try and sell them anything. I personally know lots of small business owners that don’t currently want to join me in real estate investing, but if I ask them for their help and I offer to buy them lunch for it they are usually more than willing to go through the following exercise with me (which exercise I recommend you go through):
1) After you’ve fed your friend, who is also one of your target customers, sit your friend down at a computer.
2) Show your friend your marketing materials. Whatever it is that you’re using to market your site, whether an ad in a magazine or a listing in a phone book, show it to them.
3) Next, bring up your web page on the computer and hand over the mouse to your friend. Ideally this is a friend that has never seen your site before.
4) Wait and see what they do.
5) Keep waiting. Don’t say anything.
6) Still don’t say anything.
What you’re doing is seeing how your friend interacts with your site without any help from you. You may be tempted to say “Click here” or “Read that” or “You missed the most important information on the last page” but if you’re friend isn’t doing what you think they ought to do or isn’t finding the information they ought to find, there’s a chance your other visitors won’t either.
7) After giving them a chance to click around your site for a while, ask your friend questions. Good questions include, but are not limited to:
-What did you think about the site?
-Was it what you were expecting based on the advertising I showed you?
-Was it professional / understandable / easy to navigate / informative?
-What didn’t you like?
-What information did you find helpful?
-What do you wish was easier to find?
-Was there anything obnoxious or distracting?
-Would you buy something from this web site? Why? Why not?
Whatever your friend tells you is a good indication of how effective your site will be on other people who come through your marketing efforts.
Lastly…
8 ) Follow steps 1~7 with at least two more people, and then send your web site to anybody who will look it over for you and give you honest feedback (friends/family/business associates). You want to base your actions on a group of people, not a single person’s opinions.
Measuring Effectiveness through Web Statistics
Once you’ve spent a bit of time creating a site and the marketing material to bring people to the site, and you’ve run it past some of your target customers, the final step is to keep an eye on how well it’s doing. Even if you’re getting the desired result from your site (people buying products, ordering services, joining newsletters, etc…) there are likely many areas that could be improved on.
If you have access to the advance tutorials, be sure to look at Web Site Tune-Up Basics: How to Triple the Effectiveness of Your Web Site to get an introduction to web analytics. That might sound boring, but it’s actually addictive when you get into it.
If you don’t have access to the advanced tutorials, take a moment to learn about them and some of the other resources available to members of this web site.
Other popular Web Site Tune-Up tutorials:
- How to Turn Nibbles into Bites
- Sure-Fire Site Improvement with Split Testing
- How to Boost Your Conversion Rates