Website Marketing: Usability for the Already-Awesome
Website marketing is as much about getting repeat visitors, and gaining a reputation as a great company, as it is dragging new visitors into the maw of your website! One of the golden rules of website marketing is that if you build it, they will come … and if you make it easy for people, they will come back. Today we check out how already good, highly usable websites can take steps towards being even better.
There are four general concepts in website marketing and improvement that can help you build upon an already great design:
* Study your ’safe flights’, not your ‘accidents’
* Look at things that might go wrong, and work to make sure they don’t
* Look more broadly, at enterprise usability
* Look for needs that you didn’t know existed
Study your ’safe flights’, not your ‘accidents’
Historically, airlines improved safety by studying what happened when a plane had an accident. Now, airline safety is still a major issue (despite the fact that flying is safer than swimming in the ocean, riding a bike or driving a car), but experts study the safe flights instead, to see what went right among all of them.
In your website marketing, look at exactly what makes it easy for your visitors to do something on your site - and then look for any areas that don’t meet the expectation.
Look at things that might go wrong, and work to make sure they don’t
An accident waiting to happen is as good as an accident … especially on the Internet where you deal with such high volumes of traffic etc. If your contact form is a bit dodgy or your Flash is old, upgrade it before it starts to make things hard for people.
Look more broadly, at enterprise usability
Don’t just make sure your website works well for people that are already familiar with your industry and products - make sure your entire business concept makes sense to people.
Look for needs that you didn’t know existed
Sometimes this may mean an opportunity to broaden and diversify your business. Sometimes it might just mean adding a piece of information to the website that you didn’t know users needed. The best way to get this information is to simply ask your users - pop a little site survey on, or run a focus group. There are plenty of website marketing firms that can help out!
