• Learnability: How easy is it for people to accomplish basic tasks the first time they come to your website?
• Efficiency: Once people have learned the design, how quickly can they perform tasks?
• Memorability: When people return to your website after a period of not using it, how easily can they reestablish proficiency?
• Errors: How many errors do users make, how severe are these errors, and how easily can they recover from the errors?
• Satisfaction: How pleasant is it to use the design?

It’s easy to see how these can be positive aspects of a website. Increased user satisfaction, reduced long-term development costs (costs incurred from fixing poorly designed sites), reduced training and support costs, and repeat business are just some of the benefits you can realize when planning and developing your website with usability in mind.

But you can’t stop there. While usability should be at the forefront when creating your website, great usability alone isn’t enough to make your website successful.

Donald Norman is a renown expert on usability, user-centered design, and author of “The Design of Everyday Things.” But he acknowledges that usability without usefulness is useless. “Usability is always secondary. It’s never the most important thing about an experience. I will accept poor usability if I get what I need, if the total experience is great. I will reject perfect usability if I am not rewarded with a useful, engaging experience.”

In other words, usability is important but doesn’t even matter if the content and functionality of your website isn’t useful. It sounds simple enough, but it’s something that is often overlooked. If your website isn’t providing a useful service it doesn’t matter how good it looks or usable it is. Your visitors will quickly head elsewhere.

So while Brad was checking our site stats the other day he noticed that we were getting some traffic from an unexpected source. It appears people have been coming to our site while searching for the terms “making mojitos.” How you might ask?

Back in February, Brad and I went to a conference in Miami. While blogging about the conference we also gave some insight into the meals we had. In this post I mention that we had some Mojitos at a restaurant called The Latin American. I added the Tag “Mojitos” to that post and voila we are now getting traffic via that Tag.

Now that was one isolated post that included a Tag not associated with our business and we are getting traffic from it. Just think if you had a Blog on your site where you posted about topics relative to your business and your customers.

Just another reason to consider having a blog on your site.

And for all of those people looking for “making mojitos”…here is a link to the Bacardi site where you can find out everything you need to know to make them at home.

And if you haven’t tried it, Orbit gum by Wrigley comes in a Mint Mojito flavor that is a favorite of mine.

Well the business world isn’t a Hollywood movie with Kevin Costner. This quote comes to mind quite often when working with clients who have had a website for awhile and just aren’t seeing the results they hoped for. Having someone build a site for your business is only one part of having an online business and a small part at that. What is your strategy for marketing your website? I’m sure you have thought about how to market your business but specifically how are you driving people to your website?

Just because you build it does NOT mean the business will come.

Have you thought about any of the following?

• Email marketing campaigns to existing and or potential clients
• Sponsored links on search engines
• Google Ad words
• Start a blog about your company
• Create a MySpace or Facebook page for your business
• Make sure your website address is on all other marketing and client touch point material
• Check to be sure your site and your business is listed on all of the online directories of local businesses in your area
• Ask vendors or business partners to place reciprocal links on their sites and you will do the same for them

Those are just some of the ways we help our customers create and implement a strategy to successfully drive more business to their websites.

Because if you just build it and don’t do the rest you could end up all washed up like Kevin in one of his less popular movies.

Waterworld

]]> http://bigahha.com/blog/2008/06/27/if-you-build-it-they-will-comebut-not-without-some-additional-work/feed/ http://bigahha.com/blog/2008/06/11/being-great-instead-of-big/ http://bigahha.com/blog/2008/06/11/being-great-instead-of-big/#comments Wed, 11 Jun 2008 18:41:38 +0000 Darryl Kotz http://bigahha.com/blog/?p=45 Brad and I often talk about what type of company we want Big Ahha to be. How many employees we should have, how do we want to grow, what should our focus be etc.

We have always looked at 37 Signals as a company that seems to be built around core principles we strive to embrace at Big Ahha. A recent post on their blog, Signal vs. Noise sums up our feelings on growth and when it is ok to stay small. Here is the link below.

Finding the natural size of your company from the Signal vs. Noise blog.

Another book I found very interesting on the subject is Small Giants : Companies That Choose to be Great Instead of Big by Bo Burlingham. It’s a great read with some awesome examples of companies who made conscious decisions to stay small when they could have expanded.

Today we are more interconnected with other humans than ever before in the history of the world. We have email, text messaging, social networks, instant messaging, blogging, forums and a host of other ways to communicate with others.

While these technologies all make our lives a lot simpler in some ways…in others they make our lives more complicated.

Let’s take social networking as an example. Have you ever been asked to join someone’s network or be their “friend” on Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn or any of the other myriad of social networking sites? What happens when that invite comes from someone you really don’t want to be connected to? It’s easy if it is someone you really don’t know… you just say no. But what if it is someone you work with every day or see on a regular basis. You know if you decline their invite they will take it personally and may even ask you why you rejected them. Talk about awkward! I’ve talked with a number of friends who have had this same situation come up and my advice is simple. Just say no! People need to learn to not take things personally. My network on LinkedIn for example is all about my business life. I have networks on other sites that are for my personal interests. We are complex individuals and just because I say no to your invite doesn’t mean you are a bad person or even that I don’t like you it’s just that you don’t fit in my network. So if you ask someone to be a part of your network and they “Just say no” don’t take it personally. And if someone you really don’t want to be connected to asks to join yours…just listen to Mr. T.

Check it out.

In his blog post “The Client That Matters Most,” Robert Hoekman talks about a company who intentionally maintains a bad user experience on its commerce website. The idea is that customers will be driven to make a phone call to the company’s customer support, where the customer is then pressured with add-ons and up-sells.

But, what if the customer never makes it that far.

If a customer has a frustrating experience with your website, they will likely associate that negative experience with not only your website, but also your company. This could mean that the customer gives up on your product/service, or your company altogether based on their bad experience.

Even if they don’t immediately give up, the damage is done and is difficult to reverse. People will be wary of communicating with you when the need arises again, they will start scoping out your competition, and they will let everyone know about their frustrations.

That’s why its imperative that we do all we can to design and maintain a positive user experience and not force people down a difficult or unnavigable path. Think about your website in terms of the needs of the users, not the other way around.

Now I don’t know if this young lady has a problem with her arm and if she does I wish her well.

The point is a link to this photo has been picked up or perhaps placed by H&R Block on some of the most popular social bookmarking sites on the internet such as Digg.com and Reddit.com. The links go to the H&R Block May newsletter. Do you see where I am going? H&R Block is getting a TON of traffic to their online newsletter today because of that photo. Will anyone following the link to see the photo actually engage H&R Block for their services? Who can really say? But eyeballs that have never seen their newsletter before are there today. Just keep in mind that there are tools out there like this for you to experiment with when you are looking to go outside the box with your marketing efforts.

Big Ahha can help you find out more about these and other ways to drive traffic to your site.

If you haven’t seen it, contestants pick one case from 26 cases held by 26 lovely ladies. They then choose other cases trying to eliminate low amounts so that a “banker” will offer large amounts of money to buy the case they chose at the beginning of the round. There is a million dollars at stake and  the drama starts when contestants get greedy and say “No Deal” in the hopes that they can continue on. The problem is most of the time greed takes over and they end up going home with very little.

The game made me think about all of the options available for businesses looking for help with their web initiatives. It made me think about how making a bad “Deal” when choosing a business partner can result in lost revenues, upset customers, more work for your employees and extra expense to fix something that was not built correctly in the first place. In essence your business ends up going home with nothing because you said “Deal” when you should have said “No Deal”.

Here are some things to consider when you are trying to decide from all of the options out there.

1. Your neighbor’s, sister’s, baby-sitter’s cousin in 10th grade might have one awesome looking MySpace page for his rock band but do you really want him building your website  for your “most valuable customers”?

2. A great way to save money is to go with a local college student. You can often find one to build you a site for a fraction of the hourly rate of a true local web firm. Just one question. What happens when that college student heads home for the summer or takes a three month trip to Uzbekistan and your site goes down?

3. Use Go Daddy or one of the other hosting companies with “web page builder tools”. This might work for some smaller mom and pop businesses. Remember you won’t get the same level of service you will from a local shop and when your business grows beyond the template based design you will need to start all over. If brand development and reinforcement is important stay away from templates.

4. The local newspaper, phone, cable or yellow pages company. These companies may offer web design services but it is a secondary service to the core products they create or provide for their customers. You need to ask yourself the question, how important is your website to your business. Most companies today realize that consumers are spending more time online researching, buying products and reading service reviews. In order to succeed they need a business partner who is focused on web solutions.

These are just a couple of “bad deals” you might want to stay away from when considering a business partner to create your customers online experience with your company.

Think about what it is like when you have a face to face meeting with someone to discuss how your company might be able to help them. What formalities are generally present? How you greet someone, shake their hand and engage in small talk generally all before getting down to business. Body language, tone of voice and questions based on comments all lend themselves to a decision being made about whether or not to do business with one another before you ever get to talking about price for product or service.

So how does all of that relate to the message you send through your website? Or more importantly how much time are you spending on the message you send through your website?

You don’t have the opportunity to influence a visitor to your site by talking about the photo of her children on her desk or by commenting on the tie he may be wearing that day. You don’t know what questions might come out of the information they are consuming on your site unless they are willing to ask you. You have not scheduled a half hour or an hour to meet with them so you are lucky if they spend 1 minute looking at the information on your site and if they don’t find something of value they are off to your competition in an internet flash. Companies tend to spend a lot more time on the messaging for in person visits and hard copy messaging than they do for their web messaging.

The bottom line is you need to spend a serious amount of time on what your web message is going to be. You can’t leave it to chance that someone is going fill out a contact form or call you from your website if they have questions and if they can find that information on your site.

Spend quality time crafting your web message.