Time for a 10-Minute Website Critique

Mark N. Cahill -- Expert Business Source, 2/16/2007 12:42:00 PM

Small and medium business websites are a crucial first point of marketing and sales contact. Often, they are the great leveler, allowing us to appear larger than we are, perhaps even more professional than our much larger competitors. To reap the maximum benefit, however, business owners must be able to critically evaluate their websites, without prejudice, to identify and capitalize on the best areas of opportunity.

Take 10 minutes for a quick evaluation of your website – from a prospect’s perspective.Ask yourself these questions:

1. What is the initial feeling you get when you come to the homepage? Ignore the words; think instead in terms of images, color palette, etc. Hopefully, the feelings that emerge include “professional” or “reliable” instead of “disorganized” or, worse, “nauseating.”

2. What general message are you trying to convey? Does it match the mission of your business? Is the message easily discernible on your site, do you need to dig to find it, or is it missing entirely?

3. Is the important information easy to find? Remember that each time you ask someone to make a choice (by clicking on a link or a page, for example), a percentage will opt to make no choice at all; they will simply go away. Don’t make them work too hard for their reward – even if that reward is as simple as a phone number.

4. What words would you use to search for your product or service? Enter those terms into Google, MSN Live Search and Yahoo Search. Is your site listed on the first page of search results? Would it be reasonable to expect that it would? Some search terms are so broad that they are useless in finding what you need (for example, “contractor” or “jeweler”). But you can improve results by narrowing the search for “contractor central Massachusetts” or “Jeweler Boston.” Your website should be optimized for those types of search.

5. Could you benefit from opening your site up to a dialog with customers? Are you providing any means of interaction with your customers, via an email link, a forum or even a blog? Is the value to be gained – in the form of reputation or affinity – worth the trade-off of the extra time you would have to spend on this type of discourse?

That’s the end of the quiz. How did you do? Are you putting your best face forward on the Internet? Take a similar look at your competitors’ sites. How do you stack up?

Here are five points to keep in mind for improving the “usability” of your site:

1. People don’t read a lot on the web. Bring your message as far forward as possible.
2. Use bullet lists where possible. Keep things brief and make your point quickly.
3. Consider animation or video as an alternative to text.But don’t let the method get in the way of your message.
4. Design is important, too. Make sure you have a color palette that evokes the proper emotions for your site.
5. Be consistent across the entire site with both your messaging and your design. Both are required for a professional-looking site. If you are all over the board stylistically, your message will be lost.

You should do this type of evaluation regularly, as your business evolves. Fixing the shortcomings on your website will make your business more appealing to customers and prospects – and might just have a direct impact on your bottom line.

Mark Cahill is webmaster at Atex and has worked on numerous projects for small/medium businesses with Vario Creative, a marketing services and graphic design company.