Online Marketing: Effective Websites
The web is a maze, but understanding the small part of it that you own is vital to building an online experience that delivers. Often this type of development work is handled externally and ensuring that the deliveries match your expectations can be tough. Communication is key, but how do you bridge the ‘Jargon’ gap between yourself and your development team? In this article FauvelKhan Design Director, Warren Fauvel offers four key tips to ensuring your web development stays on track from start to finish…
At FauvelKhan we’ve worked on lots of complex online projects with a huge variety of clients. Setting a clear brief is the first step in starting a successful commission; here we’ve listed a few elements to consider in your briefing:
Function: What is your website for?
In our experience websites fall into one or more of the following categories
- Capture- Providing a Contact Point
- Portfolio/Wiki/Blog- Providing Examples of Work/Information
- E-Commerce- Providing a Purchasing Portal-
- Software As A Service (SAAS)- Delivering a Service/Download
Deciding what function(s) your site fulfills will immediately allow you to develop a better understanding for what KPI’s you’ll need to measure to gauge it’s success and thus improve it.
Audience: Who is your website for?
Every site will have a broad range of users, but realizing what ties your users together will allow you to tailor the delivery much more appropriately. When considering your audience it is important to take into account the following constraining factors:
- Physical - How important is legibility?
- Mental - How complex can your site be?*
- Knowledge – What online conventions will they be familiar with?
- Technological – What will they use to access the site?
- Purpose- Why are they visiting your site?
*Remember the average reading age in Britain is just 9
You may decide that you have several different users groups who cover a broad range of abilities and are mutually exclusive in their requirements. In this case it may be worthwhile considering several micro-sites, or different user interfaces based on entry points.
One tool that we’ve used to great success is Personas. Using personas you give each of your target users a name, face and description and allows swift communication of the needs of each group. It also gives a great point of reference for discussion allowing for easy reference and recall e.g. “Would Jim struggle to understand this” as a pose to “is this legible enough for our older users”.
Marketing: How will visitors find your site?
Traffic to your site will be generated through the following channels, each requires a different investment, which we’ve outlined below:
Direct Traffic- Investment in general Marketing and PR will drive brand recognition and thus direct traffic.
Search Engines- Invest in Search Engine Optimisation including Keyword Research, Optimised Copy, Speed Optimisation and Link Building.
In-Bound links- Invest in Link Building, Social Media and Strong Content to attract people to share your content on their sites.
Paid Links- Such as AdWords, Facebook Ads
Each channel requires a certain amount of planning and can be optimized to create a better user experience. Deciding early how you will generate traffic will allow you design team to plan the build appropriately.
The function of your site will also have a heavy bearing on your marketing activities and it’s important to weight the results of your marketing according to your overall goal.
Performance: How will you track and optimise the site?
It’s a common misconception that after a site goes live the job is done. In fact the opposite is truer. Once a site is live its imperative that you undertake regular reviews of its performance and dedicate budget to optimizing. To do this effectively you’ll need several things:
Analytics- Analytics come in several flavors, most notably, statistical, mouse-heat maps and action recordings. All are useful but even the most basic analytics (Google offers a free service) will offer huge insight into a site’s users.
Users- Without these your analytics are defunct. When reviewing a site’s performance its important to base assumptions on statistically significant events. For example if your site is receiving 10,000 hits but only generating 2 leads per/month the instinctive reaction is to change the contact pages. But if these pages are only receiving 2 hits the problem is actually occurring up-stream and the pages are converting 100% of users.
Design Variations- Incremental improvements are often more desirable than revolutionary ones. An effective way to manage these improvements is to ‘Darwinise’ them using A/B testing. In this model two variations of a page a created and served to 50% of users each. The page with the most significant statistics is kept and survives for further improvement.
The key to optimizing performance of a site is to expect ongoing work. Rome wasn’t built in a day, and online experiences can’t be either.
Need more help?
There is no perfect format for a brief but clear direct communication of your requirements is the only place to start. If you need any help, our strategists are trained to guide you through the steps of building a successful site in person- click here to book a meeting.