The Five Factors of Web Design

Inspired by Drew McLellan’s Five Most Important Considerations, I decided to come up with my own list, prior to actually reading his so that I wouldn’t just be rewriting what he had already said. Every time MWI puts out a proposal I go through the same exercise of trying to show the potential client that we understand who they are, who their customers are, and that we know how to help them reach the business objectives for which they approached us in the first place.

However, rather than five considerations I came up with four, the first of which is:

1. Who is the target? Seemingly basic, yet many companies build websites without knowing the answer to this question. That the target is the general public is generally not a good answer. Before building a website a company should, at a minimum, identify one or more groups of people they plan to target. They should do research to learn more about the target. And they should decide which target is the most important.

Some companies make the mistake of thinking they can successfully cater to 10 targets at once by giving all 10 target audiences what they want on the homepage. But due to the clutter this produces on the homepage the reality is that there is not much of a chance that any one of the 10 targets is going to get the message the company wants them to get.

If a certain target is judged to be the most important, then 80-95% of the attention of the website should be directed at that one target, even if it means you neglect nine others. Hitting one target by focusing on them is better than hitting none because you’re focused on ten.

2. What do you want the target to do? When it comes to web design, many people don’t think far beyond getting the target to the website, impressing them, and giving them some information. When it comes to ecommerce, the obvious goal is to get the target to purchase something. But what about a law firm’s website? What about a medical devices company? What about a biotech or IT firm? Is the purpose of the website just to be able to say you have one or is there a way to make it contribute to the bottom line?

I own a web design firm called MWI. We don’t sell anything on our website. What do we want our target to do? We want them to sign a contract for our services. In order for this to happen, we must give them a proposal first. Prior to this event, they must request a proposal which involves telling us what they would like us to do for them. To facilitate the occurrence of these events, we have created a “request for proposal” form on our website.

We direct potential clients to this page in multiple ways. There is a link in the main navigation of the website which means the RFP form is never more than one click away. Someone who comes to our homepage is likely to use the main navigation, but we have a lot of traffic that comes directly to pages within our site, such as our page that talks about our search engine optimization services. These visitors might start reading the content of the page and look over the main navigation, and so to the left of the content we have a block of text that invites them to request a proposal, as well as a link at the bottom of the content to the same effect.

3. How will you know if they are/aren’t doing it? In MWI’s case, it’s fairly easy to tell if someone is reaching the goal we have set for them because we get requests for proposals from them. But how many people are not following the path we have set for them and why not? This gets a bit trickier. It’s not enough to say because we are getting 180-200 visitors per day and only 2-3 of them submit requests that we’re not doing a good job getting the target to do what we want. The problem is that we don’t know exactly why each visitor is coming to our site. Are they coming because they’re a designer and they found a link to our site on a directory of website design firms and they just want to see our site or perhaps they are seeking employment? Or were they looking for MWI Veterinary Supplies and accidentally ended up on our site? Of course the fact that these types of visitors do not request a proposal from us does not represent a failure to get the target to do what we want because these visitors are not the target in the first place.

4. Either way, how will you improve results? By research and experimentation.
Every situation is different but with a good website analytics package (which you can get free from Google at www.google.com/analytics or for $20/month at www.mycomputer.com), some time, experimentation, and thinking, you can figure out ways to improve the rate at which you convert visits from your target audience.

In the case of MWI, I’ve placed that block of text inviting visitors to request a proposal on some pages, but on others I have not included it so that I can measure results between the two. It isn’t 100% scientific, but it does give me enough information that I better know where to spend my time.

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To recap, in order to build an effective website:

1. Identify your target audience.
2. Define what you want them to do on your website.
3. Put in place ways to measure whether they are doing what you want them to or not.
4. Use that data to improve results.

Four simple steps that will probably give you an advantage over your competitors who are, most likely, not putting even this much thought into what they are doing.