Website Analyst Newsletter
Meeting Your Needs With Excellence
Issue 18
May 2001
Editor: Lucian Millis, editor@website-analyst.co.il
Publisher: Website Analyst http://www.website-analyst.co.il/
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IN THIS ISSUE
1. Editor's Note
2. First Impressions are Everything by Diane Standish
3. Information Design - Web Usability - User Experience
4. List Management
5. Contact Information
1. Editor's Note
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2. First Impressions are Everything by Diane Standish
This may seem very basic, but if your site isn't pulling the
traffic or generating the sales you would like it to, it just
may not be the poor performance of classified ads, banner ads
or a similar service. The real reason for lackluster sales
could lie with your web site itself.
Telling someone their site has a lot of design problems is not
a very popular stance, particularly if that someone just spent
thousands of dollars to have it designed for them. Or, if they
gave up their nights and weekends to write it themselves.
The fact of the matter is, however, that the vast majority of
emails I get regarding lack of sales and consequent complaints
about other sites whose 'banner ads don't perform' or
'classified ads don't work' have much more to do with my
prospective customers' poor web site design than the ad or
banner service they're blaming. Not popular, I know, but
critical analysis is just that: critical.
This is one of the reasons why tracking statistics software is
essential to the health of a site. The site owner can track
exactly what's happening with an ad campaign and see for him
or herself what ads are working and how long someone stays at
a page. If a page gets lots of hits, but no one stays more
than a moment, chances are the page is suffering from the slow
load blues and no amount of advertising will generate sales.
One of the most common errors I see when analyzing other sites
is, unfortunately, what a new site owner wants most - lots of
graphics. Big, beautiful, full color images; spinning graphics
everywhere; animated images at every corner and on every
line; jumping, bouncing, flashing, bubbling images next to
every paragraph. Great fun, but the more images on a page and
the larger the size of the file, the longer it will take to
load. Try to remember not everyone out there has a 56k modem
hooked up to their 400 MhZ, 164 MB RAM CPU.
Think content. A few images will spice up a page, and enable
you to "hide" valuable keywords for search engine placement,
but too many large image files will send your visitor surfing
before they even know what a great product you have to offer.
A good rule of thumb: keep images under 12k and try to keep
each page limited to 5 or less files. A page should load in 15
seconds or less with a 28.8k modem. Again, it's content, not
cool, that will keep your visitors from moving on, and keep
them coming back once they've found an interesting site.
For instance, a customer wrote me and explained that he had
spent a lot of money having a web site written for him, but
he wasn't making any sales. He wanted to start a progressive
advertising campaign to promote the site.
However, when I visited his site I knew immediately that any
advertising dollars would be completely wasted. Images the
size of the Grand Canyon covered every inch of every page,
and what was worse, no image size specs (height, width) were
specified in the HTML. The pages were filled with very nice,
but very large photos, and very little text content. Even on
my top of the line system, his site suffered from slow
loading, big time. No matter what promotional campaign he
undertook, and no matter how much money he spent, he'd never
make a sale with his expensive site. Any visitors in their
right mind would leave his site long before ALL those truck
loads of images loaded.
Bottom line: think content; keep it simple; avoid too many
images; avoid too many photos; keep animation simple - and
limited. Don't talk your web designer into putting a lot of
large image files on your pages. Then, and only then, plan
your advertising campaign. And then, keep updating your
site's content to make it dynamic, interactive and attractive
to repeat visitors. If your site never changes, if your
content is never updated, what's the incentive for a visitor
(translate customer) to keep returning?
------------------ About the Author ------------------------
Diane Standish is Publisher of the eCave NetGazette. She has
15 years of marketing experience, both off and online in
computer and business services, and is founder and President
of a multi-million dollar service business. Reach her by email
at mailto:ezine@ecave.com
3. Information Design - Web Usability - User Experience
The LucDesk is a place to find links to articles I consider
noteworthy on other sites. Send contributions and suggestions
to mailto:editor@website-analyst.co.il
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