Website content
Your website is your shop front. It's a window into your company and an information source for your customers.
It needs to be attractive, but it also needs to work.
Content that works
Clear, concise content is essential. Website guru Jakob Nielsen relies upon it entirely. His
website is as unattractive
as they come. But it works. His page rank is 8/10.
Nielsen's surveys indicate how little users actually read. Even on a page like this one, you are unlikely to
read more than 40% of the words.
So, these are essential
• short simple statements
• chunked text
• subheadings
• bullets
Structuring the content logically is perhaps the most common and difficult problem to solve.
Logical information structures are my strong point. With my help you can be sure that your customers get the
message. See example.
Usability
Website usability is about making it easy to get information
from a website and to do basic tasks, such as buying a product.
Usability is important. Nielsen says it's a necessary condition for survival.
Web users have short attention spans. They may spend just a few seconds on your site before they move to another.
So, if your website …
• is difficult to use
• doesn't make a clear offer
• doesn't answer key questions
• is hard to read
… people will go elsewhere.
And you've lost a potential customer.
Usability testing
Usability testing reveals website problems. Sophisticated testing methods use videos and eye-tracking to study users'
behaviour, but can be expensive.
Nielsen's "discount usability testing" is much
cheaper. In a typical discount test, I observe just 5-8 representative users performing tasks on your website
(typically finding information or making a purchase). Yet the test is likely to reveal most of the significant
issues. For 20% of the cost, I find 80% of the problems.
Desk evaluation
But better still, especially for small sites and limited budgets, is a desk (or
heuristic) evaluation. This is also a good first step before proceeding to more elaborate testing.
In this test, I assume the persona of your target customers and evaluate your website against an array of criteria
covering
• information architecture
• navigation
• visual design
• clarity of content
Depending on the size of your site, this can take just a very few hours.
I don’t build glitzy websites, but I can tell you if your website works. Let me evaluate your website.
You'll be surprised at what it reveals.