Eleven years ago, usability guru Jakob Nielsen wrote an article outlining the top 10 web management mistakes businesses make. Jump forward to 2008 and not much has changed. Of the original 10 points, I preach these 7 every day:
1. Why do you have a website?
Building a website just because everyone else has one is not a good enough reason. As a business owner, you need to know exactly what you want to achieve with your website. If you can’t formulate a vision for your own site, how do you expect your designer, and more importantly, your customer to figure it out?
Most companies should start their web design project by finding out ways in which they can provide true customer value on their site. Give users benefits from spending time on your site, allow them to do business with you, and their money will follow. - Jakob Nielsen
2. Who are you designing for?
You may get a kick out of adding your mission statement, a photo of your management team and a history of your company right up their on your home page, but your visitors won’t.
I’ve mentioned this time and again: Customers don’t care about your company. All they want is a product/service/idea that will help fix their problem. Always remember that you are not the target audience for your website.
3. Pick website managers to take your website forward, and stick with them.
Every time you chop and change between designers or website managers, your visitors will know the difference. Consistent design and content management elements are crucial.
Web designers are a fickle bunch, so each time you change service providers, you’ll hear a different story. Whether you’re hiring a website manager on retainer or to manage your website full-time (hint-hint), setting out rules and guidelines at the beginning will ensure the longevity of your website and stop you from pulling your hair out.
4. Always budget for website maintenance
As a rule of thumb, the annual maintenance budget for a website should be about the same as the initial cost of building the site. - Jakob Nielsen
With the ever decreasing cost of designing a website, spending the same again each year on website maintenance is now a bear minimum. Building a site without maintaining it is a waste of your money and a waste of your customers’ time.
Furthermore, the Web changes constantly. To keep up with the change in design trends and online marketing ideas, Nielsen recommends a re-design of a website at least once a year.
With this in mind, you can see how partnering with a reliable website manager to provide ongoing website maintenance and site re-design solutions will benefit your business.
5. The Web is different from other media
Re-purposing your offline content for use on your website is a bad practice. The Web is different from print or any other medium. Web content needs to be created to achieve specific results, and a re-worked brochure will generally fail to get this point across.
6. Manage your links for improved results
Hyperlinks are the force behind the Internet, and the sole reason the Web became commercially viable. You don’t need to send visitors to your home page. In fact, you don’t even need a home page.
Landing pages and advertising are the heart of an online marketing campaign. Using online advertising coupled to specific offers on different landing pages is an effective way to generate multiple streams of online income, sales leads and any other planned outcome you can think of.
The more links you build, the more results you can expect. Tell any SEO professional that link building isn’t important to your online marketing campaign and he’ll still be laughing a month from now.
7. Embrace the Web now before it’s too late
Many small business owners hesitate to spend the lion’s share of their marketing budget online. If you’re one of them, you need to change your attitude. There is no more efficient marketing media available. Ignore the Web if you want, but you’ll suffer for your ignorance.
Next steps
I visit hundreds of websites every week, and I see evidence of these problems all the time. In my experience as a designer, a website manager and a corporate marketing manager, both designers and decision makers are to blame for not moving a businesses forward online. Every stakeholder in every web project needs to spend more time thinking about a website’s future before they build it.
If you’d like help taking your website forward, I’m for hire. If you’re not sure yet how your website could be helping grow your business, ask me for a website audit. I’d be only too happy to give you my opinion.
