Since it first poked its head above the water, web developers, designers & marketers have argued over whether flash is the future of the web or whether it should be wiped off the planet. The rise of AJAX has softened this debate slightly & provided a third option, but flash is still used every day by people who don’t understand its limitations & is still cursed daily by those who don’t recognise its talents.

This article explains exactly what’s bad about flash, what’s good, and how best to use it…

Keep Reading this entry –»
 

I wrote recently about the changed role of the homepage: Traditionally people think of the homepage as the ‘entrance’ to the website, whereas it’s now more like a central atrium / hallway. Just as that has changed, the old role of the homepage has been picked up across the rest of the website…

Keep Reading this entry –»
 

I’ve been involved in a few new-website projects that have begun with a ‘benchmarking’ exercise. These often consist of a big spreadsheet with a list of competitors across the top & a list of ’site features’ down the side. The idea is usually to then take *all* of those features & stuff them into the new website.

Here’s what’s wrong with that…

Keep Reading this entry –»
 

Your brand is not just…

• Your logo
• Your name
• Your trademarks
• Your catchphrase
• Your packaging

Your brand is…
Keep Reading this entry –»
 

This is how the average web professional thinks about homepages:

1. It is the ‘entrance’ to a website
2. It should be the primary place on the website to ‘make an impression’
3. It’s the first page on the site visitors will see

Yet often visitors just don’t use the homepage in that way. Usually, it has quite a different role to that. Here’s a little example to prove the point:

Keep Reading this entry –»
 

The simplest short-term way to improve any ecommerce website is to figure out where the problems are & remove them one by one. The obvious paradox is: If you knew where the problems were, you’d have fixed them already. So how do you find those problems? Where are you letting customers down?

Here’s a very simple way to find problems & track your improvement over time…
Keep Reading this entry –»
 

This post is about a very big point that almost every e-commerce site misses. Here it is:

Most e-commerce sites aim at that little green circle: they only cater for visitors who are actively looking to buy. This makes sense to them because their business model is purely to cater for active buyers. Shops have been doing exactly this for years offline & it’s worked perfectly well, so why do things different online? Why would you want to focus on more than just active buyers?

Keep Reading this entry –»
 

If you’re thinking about redesigning your website, here’s a simple list of three things to improve your chances of success:

1. What Does Success Mean?

What are you trying to achieve in this redesign? Do you have an objective in mind? Is there one particular problem you need to fix?

2. How Will You Measure The Results?

Are you going to survey users before/after? Will you use web analytics to measure the response to your redesign? Have you decided on which KPIs to track? (eg. number of pages visited, purchases per hundred visitors, time on site, number of visits per week per visitor, etc).

3. Who Needs To Know?

This is the biggest contributor to success: Make sure everyone involved in the redesign knows exactly why you’re going through this process. Tell them what you’re trying to achieve & why you’re trying to achieve it. It may all be obvious to you, but if your copywriter/designer/programmer/sales team/boss/business partner do not understand exactly what you’re aiming for, you’ve dramatically lowered your chances of success.

A simple way to make sure your site is easy to navigate is to make sure everything’s labeled in language your visitors understand. Here are four questions you can ask to make sure you’re doing things right:

1. Do your visitors understand what you’re talking about?

‘Asset Consolidation’ might make sense to you, but it won’t to some audiences. If your visitors cannot understand parts of your site, they’ll perceive it as difficult to use. If you’re trying to sell something they cannot understand, they’re unlikely to buy it.

2. Do your links accurately describe what’s behind them?

If you’re a furniture manufacturer & your range of beds happens to be called ‘Da Vinci’, you may decide that all navigation to the beds area of your site will use the link text ‘Da Vinci’. This makes sense to you, and it makes sense to people who know the name of your bed range, but it doesn’t make sense to anyone who doesn’t know that ‘Da Vinci’ = ‘beds’.

3. Do you use the language your visitors use themselves? (unless there’s a good reason not to)

While it’s straightforward to figure out that ‘Immediate Financial Solutions’ probably means ‘quick loans’, using terms wildly different from the words your visitors use is unlikely to pick up much search traffic. If you’re selling burgers, you’ll probably sell more by calling them burgers than ‘meat patties’.

There are occasions when you need to break this rule: While visitors will search for terms like “cheap beds”, “cheap hotel london”, they may be more comfortable actually buying if you use words such as ‘affordable’.

4. Are there better descriptions?

If most of your search traffic finds you via the phrase ’sony laptops’, yet you prefer to use the terms ’sony notebooks’ and ’sony portables’, you’re probably fighting the tide. Question the language you’re using, look for better alternatives & measure the results.

It’s important to track the results of any campaign: Sales, Conversions, Email Signups, Customers Acquired, et cetera. But another key to long-term success it to build in additional tracking that will make you more successful in the future. ‘Search’ is fantastic for this: by simply capturing the right pieces of data & making sense of it, you are building yourself a free pot of information to feed your future success.

Keep Reading this entry –»