Redesigning a website isn’t a simple matter. People tend to think
that if they just change a few colours, the font, and add a photo,
their website will be a winner. But unless there is a clear
understanding of the site’s purpose and the desired audience, the site
will not be a success – and that is never pretty.
“Companies are increasingly embracing the idea that design is a
key element of strategy” according to a recent
article
in Business Week. The article highlights the upcoming redesign of
Yahoo, which, though it can be considered a successful site and is
ranked 8th in Business Week’s list of 50 top performers, could be
better. Yahoo.com remains cluttered and scattershot, almost
schizophrenic. If looking at a company's home page is like reading its
palm, Yahoo's tells the story of a company trying to be everything to
everyone. There are headlines, celebrity gossip, e-mail logins, search
-- even Web hosting for small businesses. Is it a media company, a
services company, or a search company? Says John Zapolski, a former
manager of several design teams at Yahoo: "You can't immediately tell
why Yahoo is the best at anything." Ouch.
So how can you learn from Yahoo? It’s as simple and as involved as
developing a business strategy for your website.
Business Strategy
Vision, mission, objectives, goals, strategies and tactics aren’t
just a collection of words dusted off at the beginning of every year or
for every communications’ plan. They need to be understood if they are
to be realized and goals need to be measurable. Whatever your strategy,
before implementing any project you need to know what your critical
success factors are so you know how to achieve success and measure it.
For websites it is tempting just to fall back on web logs and page view
metrics. However, more and more companies are coming to believe in the
importance of understanding behaviour. How are users using the site and
how do you want them to use it?
Defining the site’s purpose
Why do you have a website? Does your answer(s) align with your
business strategy? Does your site have measurable objectives? Who is
accountable for its success?
There are four basic objectives to communicating information: to
inform, to entertain, to promote (indirect sales) and to sell. Your
site may have one or more of these objectives in which case you need to
prioritize and define different areas.
Your goals need to be smart — specific, measurable, accessible,
reachable and timely. To have a goal that just states “to communicate
with employees/customers” isn’t sufficient. How will you know if you
are communicating successfully? Is it through use of the site? Employee
Satisfaction survey results? Online sales numbers? What is it that you
are communicating? How often? Do you have weekly, monthly, quarterly
and annual goals that need to be reached? What happens if they aren’t
reached? Who is accountable? How are you promoting the site? How are
you measuring your promotion efforts?
These are just some of the
questions you need to address to develop your goals for your strategic
website. You also need to have a strong understanding of your
users.
Understanding your users
It is important that you have a good understanding of your
audience.
Websites may have been initiated for a variety of reasons but at
the end of the day it is the user of the site that determines if the
site is a success. Demographic information like age, sex, education,
economics, and geographic region, will provide you with some basic
guidelines but the more detail you can collect the better able you will
be in addressing your users’ needs. In order to understand your users
and the issues they face, data can be collected using qualitative
(interviews and focus groups) or quantitative (surveys and log
analysis) research. A mixture is recommended as qualitative information
will give you details and depth in understanding issues; quantitative
will provides statistical data for baseline comparison (comparing
results over time).
Research questions should relate to corporate objectives.
Understanding corporate goals and getting a clear picture of current
issues will enable you to develop questions to bridge the gap between
where you are to where you want to be.
Once you’ve collected sufficient information on your users and
have analyzed the results you need to confirm your goals and outline
tactics to fill any gaps.
Your tactics in fulfilling your website strategy also need to include
an assessment of your resources —content and digital assets, staff, as
well as technology and functional requirements.
Content requirements
A site content audit is highly recommended prior to redesign. If
undertaking a new site then an assessment of the material you have
available needs to be completed and a list compiled of new content that
needs to be written including digital assets (graphics, images,
documents) that may require treatment. Research on your users will
reveal what information they want and need to access, the frequency
they need to access any content and also the importance of specific
content. This knowledge will provide the shape of your information
architecture and layout of information.
Staffing requirements
Content authors and owners need to be defined so that content is
maintained and updated regularly. Every site needs to have an executive
champion – someone who understands the site’s strategic objectives and
who is accountable for its overall success. Publishers, designers, and
content authors should meet on a regular basis to discuss issues as
well as to ascertain whether or not the site is meeting the strategic
goals. An editorial policy should be created so that all staff involved
with the site understand the standards and follow the site guidelines
to maintain consistency and cohesiveness. It is highly recommended that
an editorial committee be struck to provide a point of contact for
people involved in the site. Both the intranet and Internet have unique
challenges but providing clearly established roles and accountability
there is less opportunity to get bogged down in internal politics. (See
Governance articles for more information)
Technical requirements
Technology should support business and user requirements and
should ‘scale’ to support future requirements. Most companies started
with simple websites with static HTML and FTP (file transfer protocol)
but now they recognize the need for more users to be involved. Some
considerations include number of users managing new content, publishing
and workflow; collaboration; application access; file management, etc.
You may require a content management system, a document management
system, a portal, or other technology to support your requirements.
There may also be specific features that the business and users need
access to – tools, dashboards, reports etc. Knowing your business
strategic objectives as well as the day to day requirements of your
users will enable you to create a list of functions and features you
require in your technology.
Once requirements are clearly defined you must incorporate how
success is to be measured.
Taking Measurement
Measurement is a must. A measurement plan should include weblogs
or metrics programs such as WebTrends or Urchin analyze key user data
including:
-
Page views
-
Visits
-
Unique visitors
-
Referrals (what URLs did the user come from)
-
Entrance pages
-
Exit pages
-
Top sections, pages, downloads, etc,
Weekly, monthly and annual comparisons are important for updating
and tailoring sites according to user demand. HITS are not business
metrics – they’re server performance metrics and can be very
misleading.
In addition to log analysis, periodic user surveys (coupled with
focus groups and usability testing) are good tools for gaining valuable
insight into what users want and need from your site.
Design Strategy
Once you have an understanding of your users and your business
requirements and know how you’re going to measure success you can build
your design strategy.
Your design strategy should be reflective of your business and
communication objectives:
-
What is it that you want your website to do?
-
What do you need it to achieve?
-
What do you need to emphasize?
-
What are your organization’s brand rules and limitations?
Design should incorporate and be an integral part of your branding
strategy. Standards and guidelines need to be developed for consistency
and effectiveness. After all, if everything on your site is a different
colour how can you emphasize what is important?
Applying strategy
Now that you know what your site’s purpose is, who your audience
is and what you want to achieve with your site you can put it all
together. You want to emphasize content that will get your users to do
what you want them to do – learn, be entertained, become aware, and/or
buy. You need to establish measurements of your users’ behaviour to
determine if your site is achieving all it can.
Design isn’t simple. It will need to be redone if it isn’t
reflective of business requirements that take your users into account
and have defined success measures. So if you want your site to be
pretty, first make sure it is strategic – then it will be pretty
successful.
Related Articles
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II: Structure comes before design
Design III: Making and sustaining a good first
impression
Prescient Digital Media is a
veteran web and intranet consulting firm with 10 years of rich history.
We provide strategic Internet and intranet
consulting, planning and communications services to many Fortune 500 and
big brand clients, as well as small and medium-sized leaders.