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Part 3, Why Bad Websites Happen to Good Companies: Misunderstanding or Neglecting Information Architecture

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Dec 29, 2008; Category: Bad Websites/Good Companies, Design/Development, Marketing; Tags: Design/Development, Information Architecture, Usability; No Comments

Information Architecture (IA) refers to the organization and presentation of information on your website. Sounds simple enough, but many website owners and designers give it very little (if any) thought. Fundamental to the IA process is thinking through what information your visitors might come to your website to find, and providing obvious pathways designed to lead them to it.

The first part of the process is to identify your audiences. We’ve used the plural because most companies have more than one audience. Let’s say your company sells a technical widget to other companies (B2B). Your audiences might break down as follows in a particular company:

1. the technician who will use the widget, and needs details about how it works
2. the technician’s manager who authorizes the purchase and needs ROI information
3. the marketing manager who sells the company’s services and needs information about how the widget provides them with a competitive advantage.

Each needs different kinds of information to make a buying decision, or use your product, or to help them do their jobs. Rather than looking at your information from the perspective of "what-I-have-to-say," try looking at it from the perspective of your audience: "what-I-need-to-know." You might discover that some of the information your visitors need is not on your website, in which case, you need to create it. (Don’t settle for the lame excuse, "They’ll just have to call us for that information." Because they won’t.)

If you have clearly distinguishable audiences with different needs, you might consider addressing them separately on the homepage, with action messages/links directed at each audience, which allows visitors to self-select into one of the audience groups and go to a "start page" written to address them from their perspective. This requires brief, well-written, motivating action messages, but it can show your various audiences that you understand who they are and what their needs are.

Apart from creating special pathways for important audience segments, all websites need an easily understood, "intuitive" global navigation system. That means intuitive from your audience’s point of view, not necessarily yours. Intuitive navigation always rests on a well-thought-through information architecture.

If you want to see how NOT to create intuitive navigation, go to virtually any government website (though they’re getting better). It’s likely you will see information organized by government department, rather than by what visitors want to know. If you are looking for information about a particular service or program, you first must figure out which department is responsible for it. Then you may be able to navigate to the information, or maybe not. It works great for government employees who understand how the system is constructed; not so great for most constituents.

The basics that must appear on all website navigation (the labels can vary) is:

1. Home (no, making your logo a link to the home page is not obvious to everyone)
2. Products and/or Services
3. About Us
4. Contact Us

Those are the minimum global navigation items for a business website, but most sites contain more, depending on the kind of business and the ways it chooses to engage its audiences. Keep in mind that, if your customers can’t find the information they need on your website, they may buy an inferior product or service from a company that does a better job of providing information (ouch!).

Effective information architecture can only be developed by understanding and considering the needs of your visitors. It requires some thought and a real effort to look at your information from their perspective. Done well, it can result in more business. Done badly, it can turn business away.

For more posts in this series, see the “Bad Websites/Good Companies” category at right.

Part 2, Why Bad Websites Happen to Good Companies: Creating a Website that Doesn’t Accurately Represent Your Company

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Dec 28, 2008; Category: Bad Websites/Good Companies, Design/Development, Marketing; Tags: Design/Development, Marketing; No Comments

Maybe you saw another company’s website and decided you wanted one just like it. Same bells, same whistles, same cheesy photo of two disembodied hands sealing the deal on the homepage. So you reworked your content to fit into a container that was created for another company’s web presence.

Or maybe your company has only one employee (you), and you’ve decided that in order to compete, it has to appear bigger. So you carefully craft an online identity that gives visitors the idea that you have "people."

Maybe you’re an employee of a company whose business is harmful to the environment, and you think that if you initiate and publicize some kind of "green" program on your website, no one will notice the dead fish directly downstream from your manufacturing plants. Or that publishing a code of ethics on your website will innoculate you from criticism (Enron’s Code of Ethics booklet can be purchased on eBay, "never been used").

Whatever reason you might have for trying to appear as something you are not, please don’t do it. Sooner or later, you’ll be found out, and with social media’s ability to spread the word, your credibility will be difficult to rebuild. If your market doesn’t trust you, you’re done, particularly as a small service business, or any business for which alternatives exist. Effective online marketing begins with respect for your market, and attempting to fool them is not an indication of respect.

Instead of trying to pretend your company is something it’s not, embrace or deal with the issues that caused you to misrepresent your company in the first place. Instead of copying another website, try to analyze what you like about it and bring some of those approaches into your website, adapted to your own unique message or strategy. If you’re a one-person-shop, tout your agility and flexibility, or whatever other real strengths you possess. And if your company is dumping toxic chemicals into the local river, just stop it! But please, don’t pretend you’re green.

For more posts in this series, see the “Bad Websites/Good Companies” category at right.

Part 1, Why Bad Websites Happen to Good Companies: Thinking of the Company Website as an Online Brochure

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Dec 23, 2008; Category: Bad Websites/Good Companies, Design/Development, Marketing, Zeitgeist; Tags: Business, Design/Development; No Comments

Ah, the good old days, when the web was a simpler place: you could just take your company brochure and put it online. Often, the only interactive feature was an email link. It was all about companies putting their message out to their market, which was presumed to be unable to contain itself waiting to see the company website. The "online brochure" is a recent version of the "horseless carriage." We all had difficulty at first seeing beyond the print paradigm we were familiar with and understanding that we had our hands on an entirely new thing that required us to think differently in order to utilize its potential. Unfortunately, some of us still have that difficulty.

More and more, however, companies are beginning to understand that their website is not a broadcast station, from which the faceless corporation blasts out its message to a faceless market. People in companies are recognizing the need for their website to serve as a business platform; a tool for connecting with and interacting with people in their markets. The value of the online business platform is its ability to enable person-to-person communication, one-to-one, about various issues an individual customer faces. To customers, the web is a personal experience. They don’t find impersonal, puffed up company websites helpful. (Have I bold-italicized people/personal enough to make my point? Because I can do more…)

One of the primary reasons the shift from online brochure to one-to-one communication tool is not happening faster is that it’s threatening to traditional company roles and ideas about protecting the company brand. If one-to-one communication is enabled, the company facade will be breached, and its brand may be called into question. Traditional business people want to control the message and maintain the facade.

But brands are always being called into question; traditional managers and business owners, secure in their marketing communications cocoons, just don’t know it. Every time a customer has a difficult or frustrating experience with a company product or service (think "phone company"), believe me, they understand there’s a disconnect between their experience and the ads they see on TV or in magazines. And they don’t tend to think of their experience as an aberration. One-to-one interaction gives people at the company an opportunity to resolve the issue and solidify a customer relationship. The alternative is to lose a customer, or at best, create a disgruntled customer who tells friends about his bad experience.

Using the web as a one-to-one business platform means giving up the online brochure paradigm, not just creating a "customer service" tab on the online brochure. It means connecting customers with technical issues to technical people, and people with service issues to service people, who are themselves able to access useful information and authorize solutions. It means creating feedback loops that are not only usable, but compelling. The technology exists. The willingness to use it exists in some companies, but not in others. Yet.

For more posts in this series, see the “Bad Websites/Good Companies” category at right.

Intro: Why Bad Websites Happen to Good Companies

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Dec 21, 2008; Category: Accessibility, Bad Websites/Good Companies, Design/Development, Marketing; Tags: Design/Development, Marketing; No Comments

You’ve seen them: surprisingly bad websites representing good companies or organizations. Websites with Flash intro screens, incomprehensible menus, bad links, and no discernible message. Websites that drop you off unexpectedly in the middle of nowhere with no clear indication how to get back without hitting your browser’s back button. Websites with so little traffic that you cause a spike in the unique visitors graph just by visiting the homepage. Websites that haven’t changed or been updated since the dotcom bubble burst. Websites that make you cringe if they belong to your company.

In a series of posts over the next several weeks, we’ll look at how and why bad websites happen, what you can do to avoid having them happen, and if they’ve already happened, what you can do to fix them. You may recognize your website falls short of what you’d like it to be, and that’s good! Before you can fix the problem(s), you have to be aware they exist.

We’re going to start with this premise: websites require your attention, effort, time, and willingness to engage your market to have any value to your business. The days of online brochures are long past. Having a brochure site is like going to a party, but standing in the darkest corner of the coat closet. If nobody notices you, and you’re not willing to engage in conversation, there’s not much sense in going to the party. Or having a website.

For more posts in this series, see the "Bad Websites/Good Companies" category at right.

Determining Usable Window Space at Different Resolutions

Author: Ray Gulick; Published: Dec 21, 2008; Category: Accessibility, CSS, Design/Development; Tags: Browsers, Design/Development, Monitor Resolution; No Comments

A certain amount of confusion exists about designing for different screen resolutions. Many web designers assume that 800×600 resolution gives them 800 pixels in screen width, and 600 pixels of depth that can be considered "above-the-fold." However, this is far from the case. All browser windows have scrollbars and toolbars that must be accounted for, and of course, there is no consistency across browsers in how much screen real estate they use.

For the sake of demonstration, I’ve created a couple of images for 800×600 and 1024×768 screen resolution, using the Windows Internet Explorer browser templates provided by Joel Laumans (thanks, Joel). He’s used the assumption that an 800×600-pixel screen allows the browser window to be sized at 800×600 pixels, which is usually true, but not always, due to monitor differences. We’re going with that assumption also, to simplify the issues. Some of the numbers below will be different with diferent browsers.

First, let’s look at width. Beyond this mention, we’re going to ignore the fact that it’s possible to open a list of favorites on the left of many browser windows. We are, however, going to allow for the scrollbar and right border, which carve out 22 pixels. Next, allow for the left border, which takes another 6 pixels. Then, to be safe, we’ll allow another 4 pixels on each side, for an 8-pixel "safety margin." Let’s do the math: 800 – 22 – 6 – 8 = 764 pixels of usable width.

Next, let’s look at depth. Obviously, web pages can be very long. What we’re concerned with is trying to identify the above-the-fold depth: the part of the screen that shows without the need to scroll down. We’ll never be able to be certain of this depth, not only because of browser differences, but because of the broad range of choices that individual users make with toolbars, tabs, status bars, etc. All we can do is try to find a reasonable depth that accommodates most users. We’ll use 170 pixels as our assumption about how much room we have to leave for toolbars and tabs (I’ve seen more than that, but those folks have "embraced" scrolling as "just something you do" on all webpages). We allow 26 pixels for the status bar at the bottom of the browser window, and another 4 pixels for safety margin. The math: 600 – 170 – 26 – 4 = 400 pixels of above-the-fold depth.

The examples: 800×600 |1024×768