Look, you are here because you aren't happy with your website results. If the web was as simple as it looks, if intuition and common sense worked, if you could just transfer print materials onto a web page, you'd already have double digit conversion rates.
Most of the issues retarding your website returns are straight forward, easy to implement and have dramatic impact on your bottom line. Most are hidden in full view, right in front of you. But it takes experience and expertise to priortize — to know the vital few from the trivial many.
Example: We often ask people for the top three reasons users visit their website. You'd be surprised how often they can't answer — yet you can see how vital this is to success.
In a general sense, here are a few areas we find lacking in most web efforts. Do any sound familiar?
1. Incoherent Web Management Processes
The first thing SMBs must be, on small budgets, is efficient. You can't afford slippage and missteps. Web managers tell us they need systems that help them manage with more visibility, transparency and acccountabillity — like the big boys do it. The web is too complex today. Guesswork, intuition and trial-&-error will just get your futher behind, Today, put systems in place that help you KNOW:
- Web Optimization Strategies - The web has gone Newtonian. Successful sites continually experiment and test which web page factors most positively influence visitor behavior,
- Iterative Management - "Continuous Improvement" is a process that produces proven results in complex environments such as the web.
An improvement procedure like Iterative Web Management is a sub-set, designed to achieve goals through small, incremental and managable steps, tailored exactly to smaller organizations on smaller budgets,
- Data-Driven and Business-Focused - Tracking and measuring visitor behavior creates the link between the website and the user experience. It build a bridge between the organization's goals and the site improvements needed to achieve them. If you don't measure it, you can manage it.
Needed Shift: A shift in how SMBs manage their websites. Systems must be implemented that narrow management's options for website improvements. Secondly, management processes must be specifically structured for the SMB size - small to modest budget, minimum risks, small team size and short time-cycles.
2. Understanding the Key Business Framework that Drives Outcomes
SMB web managers tell us they need a system to understand the relationship between their website, a successful visitor experience and the business results that provides. We call it the Golden Triangle.
Needed Shift: A shift in how you think about your website, and how to use a successful visit as the core metric for measuring website effectiveness.
3. Keeping Up With Current Web Best Practices
Whether you're a business web owner or a web design group, you're busy doing what you do. A major business issue for SMBs is not having the time and resources to keep up with the rapidly evolving information on website optimization. Many times it's the simpliest best practices but they have huge ramifications.
- Look at how often these straight-forward web failures occur. Notice! 79% of users surveyed think website aren't even make their text legible.
- Look at this study at how often obvious issues are missed in landing pages, the same whether referred from e-mail or keyword ad campaigns.
- Here's another one we see far too often - how content is presented / formatted. On most web pages, text is presented in disasterous narrative form, ignoring the vital principles of content scannability.
Needed Shift: An "On-Demand", "Right-Time" information delivery system that doesn't break the bank. You need a system of "At-The-Desk" training and informal learning that exists alongside being productive on the job.
4. Knowledge of the Customer - Tuned into User Preferences
SMBs websites too often divorce the web page from the mental processes, attitudes and desires in the mind of the user at each stage as they interact with the site. Some fail to see the website as a dialogue, a conversation, in real time, with the visitor.
SMB web owners and designers over-emphasize the site's "Look-&-Feel" issues, while only 1 in 4 web users say that's a top priority.
Needed Shift: A shift in what drives website decisions. A website is the effect. The visitor is the cause. Fail to "Design with Intent", make decisions on the basis of driving a visitor and/or organizational goal, and you have no chance at winning!
Identifying Holes in Your Information Silo
