Williamstown Psychology is the psychology practice of Camille Folley and Fiona Lacy who each have over 15 years of experience and specialised training in psychological counselling and psychotherapy.
We worked with them to develop their online strategy and design and optimise their website for the search engines.
ZDNet Australia’s Jude Willis has written a great post Why eBay tried to screw Aussie users. Apart from it’s discussion on the failed eBay PayPal debacle it has some great insight into the lack of an online shopping industry in Australia.
Some interesting points:
“According to Jenny Wilson, lead technology partner for Deloitte Australia, consumer confidence with online transactions has been scaring even the major, trusted brands away moving beyond bricks & mortar.”
“Predominantly, Australian retail chains use their websites to spellcheck their catalogues and offer cryptic advice as to how to locate your nearest store. Any online shopping is restricted to baffling lines of merchandise that barely represents their total product range.”
It goes on to quote Jenny Wilson who states that online retail in Australia is two or three years behind other countries.
Apart from the lack of consumer confidence I’d suggest that the inherently small size of the Australian market has a lot to do with the lack of online retailers in Australia. And with the Aussie dollar almost on a par with the US that leaves us doing our online shopping overseas. Which is a shame, cause I know I’d do a lot more locally if I was able to.
How about you?
Like many businesses we have online forms on our website to make it easy for prospects to get in touch with us. Unfortunately like many businesses this means we also get a lot of spam. Did I say a lot? I mean a ton. It’s frustrating and takes time to be cleared out of the in-box each day. So much so that my husband and I have discussed adding a captcha option to our forms.
If you’ve not heard of captcha before I’m sure you’ll remember a time you’ve filled out a form online and had to enter some funny looking characters before you could submit it. I also suspect you had to fill it out a few times because they never seem to be accepted first go. Now I don’t know about you but this frustrates the heck out of me – I just want to submit a form – why are you making it so difficult?
So I suspect you know what we decided. Not to captcha. Its a fantastic idea, and definitely has some uses, but why should we make our prospective clients lives that much harder to make our lives easier? It just doesn’t make (business) sense.
A website doesn’t just have to earn you money it can help you save money too. It seems most people focus on getting a website to help them increase sales and money however with a little thought and planning websites can also help you make significant savings.
Reducing the time your staff spend on the phone helping customers is a sure fire way to reduce expenses. Here are some of the ways you can help reduce this telephone time.
You can vastly reduce the time your employees are on the phone answering common questions by including that information on your website. Basic information such as store locations – including maps, opening hours, addresses and telephone numbers are a must.
Another great tip is to create what is known online as a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) page where you can provide answers to common questions your customers ask you. You can then encourage customers to visit your website for answers to these common questions. Promote this in your marketing literature, advertising material, recorded messages and by reception staff. Of course you need to emphasis that if they can’t find what they are looking for they are welcome to call you – we’re not trying to discourage contact just reduce it where we can. I’ve found that customers love this sort of information – don’t forget it saves them time and hassle as much as it saves you!
Don’t just display descriptive information about your stock on your website – list it’s availability as well. Even down to what location has what quantities. As well as reducing the time your staff spend on the phone looking this up you are making your customer’s lives much easier. There’s nothing worse than a customer travelling all the way to a store only to find out that the item they want is out of stock.
This one is a pet hate of mine. If you are going to the trouble of listing all your products on your website why not include the prices? One large store chain once told me it was so their competitors couldn’t see their prices. Great – so they’re prepared to inconvenience a customer so their competitors can’t see their prices. Although those competitors could always call or visit a shop, 😉 I really don’t get this one – the beauty of the internet is you are not limited by space – show as much information as possible. It will make your prospective customer’s life much easier and help you get the sale.
My husband and I are currently shopping for baby furniture and it really frustrates me if I cannot get all the product specifications from a company’s website. It would make my life so much easier and save the company from having to look up the information each time I call. I suspect I am not the only one calling so multiply my questions by hundreds if not thousands and that’s a lot of time you could save.
The sort of detailed product information I would like to see includes:
This is basic information that prospective customers need to make up their minds, so have it all there for them.
Every business knows that printing and mail form a large part of your expenses. However if you use your website smartly you can reduce these costs significantly.
Where at all possible encourage your customers to use your website to download the information and/or forms they are after. This is often extremely convenient for them and as a bonus they are using their own printer, paper and ink not yours and you save on postage. You can do this for a range of printed materials including forms, manuals, product brochure, sales catalogs and so on.
If you have been mailing out newsletters to keep in touch with your customers it’s time to stop. The same newsletter can be included on your website or sent out via email, or both, for a fraction of the cost. You can also set up your website to enable prospective customers to sign up online.
Rather than post out brochures and catalogs promoting sales encourage your customers to visit your website on a regular basis to check for any promotions or sales you have. Of course you can include an online, electronic brochure for them to download. You’ll also find that customers often forward the catalog onto their friends who they think would be interested in your products and services – giving you more ways to reach new prospective customers – for no additional expense to you.
Another great way to cut your expenses is by using your website and email to provide support services.
I remember I lost the manual to our clothes dryer a few years ago and instead of having to call the company, get put on hold, request one be sent out, wait for it to arrive, yada, yada, yada I simply went to their website and downloaded a copy. So easy. Easy for me and easy for the company – they didn’t have to take my call, source the manual and then post it out to me.
There is a wide range of support documentation you could include on your website:
Email is a convenient, easy and efficient way of providing support to your customers. It can also help you cut expenses by:
These are just some of the ways your business can reduce it’s expenses by utilising your website and email. And I’ve not even touched on online marketing and promotion.
Some of these systems will take some time and effort to set-up but once they’re in place they can be used over and over and over again saving you money and providing satisfaction to your clients. That sounds like win, win to me.
I hear many hopeful web designers explain that if they had better tools they’d be able to create better work. Andy Rutledge’s great article The Employable Web Designer debunks this and provides a great list of skills one really requires if they want to succeed in website design.
Note also that nowhere in this list do the words Photoshop, Illustrator, Dreamweaver, or Fireworks appear. As I and others have observed plenty of times before, tools do not make a designer. Anyone can learn to use Fireworks or Dreamweaver in an hour or less, but nobody can be a competent Web designer unless they possess a foundation in the things listed above. Choose your own tools and learn to use them, but don’t let the tools define your abilities; tools won’t create a place for you in the profession.
If you’re wanting to become a web designer it’s a must read. In fact if you’re wanting to hire a web designer it’s also a good read. Web design requires a broad range of skills, that if the designer doesn’t possess reduces your chances of a successful website.
I was talking to a potential client the other day. Her website was ranking well in the search engines and she could not work out why she was not getting the number of enquiries she expected with the rankings she had. My first question to her was how was she analysing the success of her website. Her answer, was she wasn’t apart from checking her search rankings.
Without delving into her site and reviewing what is going on sadly she will never know what is working and what is not. And more importantly what steps she could take to improve the overall performance of her website.
The first step in measuring your website success is to determine how you define that success. Generally this should be based on the goals you set when you first started planning the site. This is one of the first and most important steps when building your website. What do you want your website to do for your business? Is your goal to sell online, collect leads, inform people or to promote your brand? You may have more than one goal for your site. These goals could include:
Once you have defined these goals you can then put measures in place to evaluate how successfully they are being achieved. For example if a goal of your website is to reduce print and mail out costs in your business you can review how many people are downloading material from your website and compare it to how many mail outs you were sending out before you had it on your site. You can also compare your printing and mail costs from before and after the material was offered on your site. These results will help you to measure the success of your goal to reduce printing and mail out costs.
The goals you set for your site will help determine the best methods of measuring your success. As a starting point the following tools can help you analyse your website traffic and make adjustments to improve on your success.
Many people will deem their website a success if they have high search engine rankings, as did my prospective client above. Unfortunately this alone is not a good measurement – all the number one rankings in the world mean nothing if they don’t convert into sales, leads or other website activity. Having said that a good presence in the search engines is a vital piece of the website success puzzle and a good start to your online success.
You can monitor your search engine rankings manually by typing your main keyword phrases directly into the search engines. Alternatively there are a number of automated rankings checkers. Here’s a list of some of the more popular:
Please note that automated rankings checkers are against the terms of some search engines – so be sure to check that what you are doing is ok before going ahead.
As I said above having high search engine rankings is no guarantee of success however it’s a start. When you combine this with analysing your website traffic (see Web Analytics below) you will have a good idea which keywords are performing and which need to be re-evaluated.
One of the great bonuses of having a website is there are many ways for you to measure and track the visitors to your site. You are able to find out many things including:
This data can then be used to help you gauge the success of your website and pinpoint what areas of your site need improving.
Links to your website can provide you a number of benefits:
Building links to your website can be a time consuming task but one that is definitely worth doing. The following tools can help you monitor the links to your website:
Both Google and Yahoo! offer a set of webmaster tools that can help you evaluate the performance of your website.
Google’s Webmaster Tools can help you monitor and track a variety of performance indicators in the one spot. They include:
Google Webmaster Tools is quite advanced but it’s a great way to see how their search engine views your website. And let’s face it, success in Google is pretty vital to most websites.
Like Google’s Webmaster Tools, Yahoo!’s Site Explorer helps you monitor and track the performance of your site in Yahoo! Features include:
Yahoo! is not as popular as Google however using both sets of tools to monitor your site will give you a clearer picture of how the search engines view your website.
All these tools on their own don’t mean a lot, it’s when you put them together and analyse the results that you start to reap the real rewards. Here are just some of the ways you can measure the success of your website using the tools above:
These are just a few of the ways you can measure the success of your website. Without this data you are running your website in the dark and most likely leaving dollars on the table in the process. Start implementing the above and make adjustments to your website according to what you see and watch your online success increase dramatically.
At some stage it is likely you will come across a bad review of your website somewhere online. I say likely as the proliferation of review websites has become big business.
So what do you do if a bad review happens to you? Firstly, don’t panic. For all the positive ways the internet allows you to promote your business it also allows people to tell others about their experiences with your business – both good and bad. This doesn’t have to be bad. Remember you can’t please 100% of the people 100% of the time and a business that just has glowing reviews might make a prospective customer wary. However the way you handle those bad reviews will say a lot about you and your business.
So what to do?
To start most sites have a feature that allows management to respond to a review. Take advantage of this by responding to all the relevant reviews. Address the issues raised and make sure your replies are courteous and well thought out. Believe it or not I’ve seen responses where the management bags the customer which only makes them look worse.
You may also want to encourage happy customers to leave positive reviews for you. Make it easy for them by having a computer set-up where they can review you quickly and easily. It might also be worth offering them something in return – obviously letting them know that what they write is up to them.
A bad review won’t be the end of you as long as you take the initiative to attract positive reviews as well. I don’t believe this type of services is going away so it’s better you address it head on rather than just hope they disappear over time.
Selling products online? If you are then take note: let your customers know when they should received their order. I’ve ordered from two different online stores in the last 24 hours and neither of them gave me any time frame for delivery. In both instances I received confirmation of my order but no delivery time frame. It’s such a simple thing to include and pretty much essential in my book. It gives the customer peace of mind that their order is important and being shipped as soon as possible.
If you sell products online do you include delivery times? If not I suggest you get onto your web designer straight away and rectify the problem.
When most people hear the words “website usability” their eyes glaze over and their attention wanders. But as a concept it’s really not that hard to grasp and if you do you’ll be rewarded with online success you’ve only dreamed about.
The definition of “website usability” is: “The ease with which a User Interface can be used by its intended audience to achieve defined goals. Usability incorporates many factors: design, functionality, structure,
information architecture, and more.”. (Source: sitepoint.com) Put in more reader friendly terms I like to define website usability as having a website that prospects can use – it’s easy for them to figure out what the site is about, find what they’re looking for and carry out tasks – easily. Emphasis on easily.
Usability incorporates more areas that I can cover in this article however by ensuring the following elements in your website are usable will go a long way in ensuring your online success:
There’s nothing worse than when a user has to guess what a navigation label means, or worse, click and realises what they thought they were clicking on has no relation to what they have landed on. Confusing navigation causes frustration and increases the likelihood of the user giving up and going to your competitor’s website instead.
Users want a website’s navigation to guide them, easily, through your website to the information they are looking for. Review your website’s navigation for the following:
1. Do the words used in the navigation meet users expectations? If a user clicks on “Contact Us” for example they would expect to find information on the various ways they could contact you. It’s also important to avoid “clever” words which force the user to guess what they will find if they click on the link.
2. Does your website utilise common navigational elements? Over time some navigation elements have become almost standard. For example most websites would contain some, if not all, of the following:
Where possible use standard terms to describe navigation and sections as it will make your users life a lot easier.
3. Is your navigation grouped into logical sections? For example Admin type links, such as Privacy Policy, Copyright and Site Map, can be grouped together.
4. Is your navigation consistent? It’s important to ensure your main navigation is consistent in location, ordering and design. Having it change throughout the website will cause confusion and frustration. Think of it like a supermarket – you may visit a store in a different location to what you are used to but no doubt the layout will generally remain consistent.
Whatever page of your website a user is on you want to ensure that they know they are on your site. Using
consistent design elements such as logos, colours, layout and fonts will help you to achieve a consistent look and feel. Similarly ensure that your website has the same written “voice” throughout.
The use of hard to read fonts, or font colours of similar contrast to the background colour, can make it hard for your users to read your website. Make sure the fonts and background colours you choose are easy to read and offer a good contrast.
Similarly think about the size of the fonts you will be using. Your target audience should help guide you to the right decision. A website targeting the teen market could get away with a smaller font than one targeting an elderly audience who’s eyesight is failing.
It is vital to design your forms with your target audience in mind. This will help you ensure that your prospect finds the form easy to understand and complete, avoiding form frustration which can often lead to them giving up.
When designing your forms think about your target audience – is it Australian, local, International or a combination? Your audience will help you to determine what standards do you need to apply in terms of address information such as zip code or postcode, country codes, phone number formats and so on.
It’s also a good idea to think about what information you want to make mandatory and what can be optional. Sometimes asking for too much information can scare off the user. Likewise if the form stretches over a few pages clearly note how long the form is and what point the user is in the filling out process – eg Page 2 of 4. This gives the user an idea of what is required, how long the process is and what step they are up to.
How often do you try searching for something using a website’s search function and end up tearing your hair out? Sadly it’s a common problem. I would almost prefer a website to have no search engine than a badly implemented one.
Think of it this way, if someone is searching for something you are selling you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find it. For this reason it’s vital your website has a good search engine that can handle typos, hyphens, plurals and search term variations. In addition if the search engine returns no results look at ways of helping your user find what they are looking for or have clear contact information displayed so they can get in touch with you.
PDF or Portable Document Format is great for saving and printing documents, especially longer documents such as manuals and eBooks. It was not designed as an alternative to users reading HTML pages online. As well as interrupting the users’ reading flow and causing them to have to open more software it is a hindrance to the search engine optimisation process. Search engines love HTML content so convert your PDF’s into HTML and benefit both your users and the search engines.
The only thing worse than an unclear link is having underlined words that are not links, although both are pretty bad in my book. Links are the mainstay of the internet. They allow you to get from point A to point B. As such you want to ensure that your users can find those links easily. They’re also used as a navigation aid to help you work out your current location and where you’ve been.
Make links obvious by choosing bold colours and have them underlined either at all times or when the mouse hovers over the link. If it’s not a link don’t underline it! It’s also a good idea to have a link change colour after it has been visited so a user knows they’ve already been to that page.
I often hear people say one of the main obstacles to testing a website for usability is the cost. This doesn’t have to be the case. While a web design/usability consultant is the ideal way to test your website you can do some simple testing yourselves.
When testing your website for it’s usability you need a group of people in your target audience who you can observe as they perform tasks. This can be done with family and friends – just make sure they fit your target audience.
Once you have your group set them tasks to perform on your website and record their progress. This will help you determine where uses get stuck or frustrated, what causes confusion and how easily they can perform the tasks you set them. This information can then be used to make improvements to your site.
Usability testing can appear daunting when you first look into it but the rewards you can reap make it a vital part of your online strategy. if you want to improve sales, increase enquiries, boost your subscriber list or make more money online website usability testing is for you.
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With the number of web design firms around getting a website should be easy. Sadly too often the opposite is true. There’s too much choice along with too many differences in services and price.
What to do?
Obviously budget is important but I feel it is far more important to choose a company that can meet your expectations. A company that can understand your business needs and provide a strategy, and develop a solution, that will fulfill those needs. A company that will listen to you and explain concepts in a language you understand. A company that understands a website is about more than looking pretty or ranking #1 in the search engines. A company that understands that those elements are just part of the equation – the site must convert those rankings into sales.
Sure look at prices but also look at how they communicate with you and how confident you are in their ability to provide what they promise. You want to build a relationship with your web designer that brings you both success. Focus on that when you’re reviewing proposals and it should help guide you to the right company.