3 Keys to Successful Web Sites
To create a successful Web site, we focus on 3 things:
- Business goals: What’s the purpose of the Web site?
- Target audience(s): Who do you want to reach?
- Content: What are you trying to explain or to sell?
Business goals: Why are we doing this?
To crystallize thinking about business goals, ask how success will be measured. For the business that runs the Web site, success could be:
- Increased online sales
- Higher ratings on customer satisfaction surveys
- More signups for a newsletter
- Email requests to sales@yourcompany.com
- Greater media coverage resulting from the site
- Reduced calls to Customer Support
The key question to ask is: What do we want users to do as a result of visiting our Web site? Then we create a site that helps them take those actions.
For more on determining the business and technical context for a site, please see The Why of a Web Site: Business Goals.
Target audience(s): Who are we doing this for?
To get a picture of our target audience(s), we consider their goals and tasks, their information-seeking behavior, experience and vocabularies. To do so:
- Look at Web log statistics for your site’s most (and least) popular pages.
- Examine search queries to see what users are seeking - in their own words and phrases.
- Ask Customer Service about the hot topics of emails and phone calls.
- Survey your site visitors online.
There’s no substitute for conducting your own research with target users. You can:
- Run focus groups to generate ideas about content and features.
- Interview people who match your target audience.
- Watch people use the site to accomplish tasks (e.g. find product information).
- Conduct a card sort. Write topic names on index cards and have participants talk aloud as they sort the content into piles, then label the piles.
For more on target audiences, please see The Who of a Web Site: Target Audience.
Content: How can we meet customer and business goals?
Once we understand our audience and their needs, we determine what available content is suitable and what needs to be created. Content Analysis identifies gaps in content collections and helps structure the information on a site.
To get started, find, print and analyze a representative sample of the site content. Be sure to get a mix of formats (such as text files, applications, video, audio, archived email messages, Web forms) and the variety of content types (such as news releases, how-to articles, white papers, etc.).
From there, we proceed to a detailed audit spreadsheet that lists every page on the site by name, URL and other important attributes, and assigns it a unique identifier.
From this detailed study of the site’s content we create a content map, a visualization of the site’s major content components, grouped to reflect the most important user and business objectives.
For more on content analysis, please see Taking Stock of What We’ve Got.