| Note: this text was modified vs. the original version, graphics and pictures were removed. Look the pdf or word version to see the integral content. |
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WEBSITES
THEY ALL WANT TO CLEAN UP THE WEBSITES
The audience? The Achilles' heel of the websites' owners. How to improve it? By comparing their bugs to the competitors' ones.
Victoria Marchand |
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Although his desk
stands in the middle of his living room, Olivier Wiener denies
having created a start-up company. "C2SP (Consulting, Strategies,
Solutions, Projects) is a consulting agency from which I am
the major shareholder." If the financing is rather traditional,
the expertise offered by this micro-agency (two people) exclusively
deals with the new economy.
Its speciality? Focusing on those websites (Internet, Extranet, Intranet) deficient of audience and users. A niche area which starts paying back since websites owners are now convinced that the on-line advertising returns will not cover the website launching costs.
Yet, mainly interested by auditing their clients' websites are the Web design and Communications agencies. Possibly because while the owners think in terms of costs, the agencies need to justify their invoices, in addition to validating the quality and liability of their work.
"A survey - ordered by AOL - demonstrates that web surfers return to a website only when the combination of these 4 basics are provided: ease of download, ease of use, quality of content and frequent updates." By adding two general aspects - i.e. search engines visibility and browsers compatibility - we get a certain number of key criteria that will influence the website's success or failure. However, what do we find out? "Most website's owners expect to reach the targeted audience on the very first day, thus showing how sure they are about the accuracy of their site's content, its usability and its positioning (more B2C than B2B)." |
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Furthermore, the road leading to traffic is far from being clear. First, the site might contain technical breakdowns (i.e. broken links/anchors, title less pages) or qualitative fails (i.e. slow/'old' pages) which might interfere with its functioning and credibility.
Moreover, a website could show 'process' difficulties, thus leading to the emergence of usability testing. A common mistake consists of thinking that the only potential 'external' relation of a company is with clients. What about employees, investors, providers and media, who should also be able to get on-line information?! These actors generate traffic as well, in addition to being qualitative.
Last but not least amongst the most recurrent defaults observed
by Olivier Wiener is the self centered approach. "On the Net,
website editing companies behave themselves as if they had no
competitors." Amazing but true! "One often thinks that competition
will not react. This is a mistake as long as benchmarking sites
allows us to classify them within a similar category in terms
of functionalities, but also in terms of far more accurate criteria
(i.e. the facility of realising a task to purchase an item)."
Thus the idea of comparing usability surveys or 'best practices'...
where results are surprising! |
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| Accordingly, a comparative survey performed by C2SP - within the banking area - shows that if a correlation between a website's size and its number of errors does exist (i.e. 1 error for 4 objects), some companies stand far away of this trend. C2SP then witnessed the best (i.e. 1 error for 10 objects) and the worse (i.e. 2 errors for 3 objects), which could partly explain why the number of visits does not automatically compares to the website's production budget. |
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Obvious facts which seem, however, to have escaped the attention of more than one owner. "A large majority of websites have been produced out of emergency, with no specific on-line strategy."
Consequence: within these companies, Web projects were mostly started off by Marketing or IT departments, resulting in the latest interactive technologies, but exclusively client-oriented.
"And where the website elaboration was not outsourced, hardly no attention was paid to tasks sharing or cost per intervention a posteriori."
This is often the case regarding a content's kick-off, thus leading to a vicious circle: from outsourced content creation to expanded maintenance costs, less regular check-ups and fewer updates, decreased number of visits and - finally - less dynamic. |
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Definitions:
Broken Anchors: anchors allows the users to navigate faster in a long document.
Pages without title: These pages create a problem for the users
since the title is used in the description of a bookmark added
to the favorites.
Broken links: broken links are leading to an inexistent document and result in the famous 404 error. In general, the user leave the site at this stage. |
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