Last week, two new clients came to me with this classic problem: they recognized that the needed a website but the didn't really understand why. As a result, they had pulled together some fairly random content and voila! Their websites were born.
This made them pretty happy until they started getting feedback from the few users that visited the sites. "I can't find anything when I'm on your site." "I keep getting lost." "Where's the stuff that I personally am interested in?" "What's the point of this site?" "If I'd wanted a brochure, I could've picked one up from your office." You get the picture.
On top of that, on further analysis of the sites (the non-profit in particular), it's clear that not much thought went into creating an intuitive navigation with clear content buckets. Neither was thought given to the hierarchy of the info tossed on the site.
Savvy Message of the Day:
It's not enough to have any old website. If it's not helping you bring in new customers or meet a clear business objective, it's a waste of time and money.
Savvy Solution:
Do your homework!
Figure out what you're trying to achieve. Ask your customers what they're looking for. Take a look at the competition. These are the preliminary steps to making sure your site is useful to your customers and works for you.
From there, develop a creative brief. For some reason, clients hate to do this. They find it intimidating and time consuming. But the fact is, the brief is the basis for your entire web site strategy. It outlines the reasons why you're doing what you're doing, who you're talking to, how you'll measure success, what you hope to achieve, etc. Your site is going to look and function vastly differently depending on if you're trying to acquire new customers or if you're looking to create brand awareness.
If you don't have the time or the expertise to write a tight creative brief, hire someone to do it for you! Ideally, it's the company you'll use to execute on the info and strategies outlined in the brief. It shouldn't cost much and the result on your final deliverable is priceless.
Secondly, make sure whoever you're working with gives you wireframes. Look at wireframes as the bones of your site. It's the structure around which the skin (the graphical elements like colors and fonts) will wrap around. Wireframes set the foundation for what goes where - giving you a sense of hierarchy so that it's logical and intuitive to your visitors and gets the stuff that important to you across.
Of course, there's so much more that goes into developing an effective site, but these are key pitfalls I see clients fall into over and over.
Don't fall into the trap of skipping steps. It may seem like the way to get a site up quickly but nine times out of 10, it's a mistake that wastes your time and money.
As the redesign of these sites starts to unfold, I'll share before and after info and pics. By then, my own site should be live! :-) Until then....
Stay Savvy!
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