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SCKattered Thoughts

Lazy Websites

Feb 26

By: Barb Cagley on 2/26/2010 5:30 PM

Imagine your alarm clock was flashing zeros at you this morning and when you did wake up the shower did not manage to produce any hot water and then, feeling perky with that extra hour of sleep and stimulating shower, you discover your car's interior lamps have been lighting the night all night long. I think it is pretty safe to say you will spend part of the day replacing batteries and lighting the pilot of the hot water tank. We rely on our appliances and cars to do what they were built for; when they stop working we do not hesitate to fix them.

With a couple of keystrokes anyone can see your website. You are relying on it to do its job. Do you know what that job is, if so, is it performing?

Let's start with your website's job description. How about establish credibility, lead generation, build or retain relationships, enhance your services, provide tools, elicit donations, sell or recruit to name a few tasks. Nothing can perform optimally if the purpose has not been clearly defined, why should a website be any different? Once goals have been established you need to know if they are being accomplished. Unlike the alarm clock a website does not typically flash at you if it is not doing its job, but it could. Analytics are the key.

Right about now you are saying to yourself, "I have heard this all before and besides I know how many hits my website is getting". That is not good enough. You should expect more than just hits and if you are not getting what you expect you need to fix it, today.

Using analytics software, such as WebTrends or Google Analytics, you can track the path a visitor takes through your site. Let's say you are promoting a new service or program using advertising. The web address in the ads is not the home page but something like www.companyname.com/promotion. Ultimately you want the visitor to sign-up for your newsletter but you also want them to look at all the services you offer. The path analysis would be set-up to look at the behavior of visitors who enter on the /promotion page. We can see what other services they spent time looking at to learn what is of interest; we also can see where they visitor left the site and if they did not sign-up for the newsletter. This information can be used to adjust the site to be more effective.

Watch user behavior.

Not sure if your website design is highly usable? There is software available that record's the behavior of visitor's cursor on your website. Let's say the home page design has icons representing different services you offer. You see that most visitors click on these icons thinking they are links but they are not. With this knowledge you can make the icons links to improve the usability of the page. This software service also tracks how far down visitors scroll on your websites pages. If you have important information deep on a page that nobody sees you can make the appropriate change. To learn more about this software visit www.clicktale.com.

Track and measure conversions.

A conversion is not just for ecommerce sites. Conversions can be downloading a white paper, signing-up for a newsletter, registering for an event, completing a contact form, viewing a video, bookmarking a page or participating in a blog. Whatever the goals of the site, they should be measured and tracked. Look at which pages lead visitors to the action desired and change other pages to imitate this page. For example, if there is a box with sign-up for our newsletter text that is being clicked make sure that box is on each page in the site.

Ideally looking at this information and then adjust the site accordingly will enable your website to be productive and earn its keep.

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