Giving Your Web Site Visitors What They Want

The reason you do a lot of thinking before you make a Web site, and quiz others about it after you put it up, is to make your site as useful and business-inducing as possible, not for yourself or your co-workers, but for current and potential customers. You may be a business genius and an expert in your field, but your customers know more about what they need from your Web site than you do. They are the experts here, the "outside consultants" you have called on for advice.

It is disheartening when people you trust kick your carefully planned Web site around and tell you all the things you did wrong, but there is only one sane response: Implement the suggestions you got.

When a hired Web designer tells you his or her work is "the latest thing" or "is made with the customer in mind," and the lay people whose opinions you solicited are either neutral toward the design or don't like it at all, the Web designer is wrong and the ordinary people are right. You can hire the world's best usability consultant to help you make a brilliant Web site, but if the first response your friends and customers have to it is, "Ewww… that's ugly," you must listen to your friends and customers, not to your hired consultant, no matter how much you paid for his or her advice.

In the end, the only true measure of a promotional Web site's quality is the amount of business it brings in. Artistic merit is not a.major concern in and of itself. Beauty is good, certainly, but only as a tool to attract customers. Usability is an excellent goal, too, but if you sacrifice esthetics to easy navigation and as a result of that decision you make a site that people don't enjoy seeing on their monitors, you have gone too far in the other direction.

The best judges of where the compromise line between artistic merit and usability should be drawn are the people who are going to view and use your site. They will not all agree with each other, but if you ask enough friends, co-workers, relatives, and customers for their opinions, a rough consensus will eventually emerge, and that consensus must be your guide.

You can augment the effectiveness of your focus group's input by giving them a number of different versions of your Web site to look at, assuming you have time and budget to make multiple layouts. This tends to produce more concrete and easily quantifiable advice than "Do you like this? If not, why not?" questioning about a single site design.

Think of the process of asking people for their opinions about two or three or ten different site versions as similar to an optometrist's "Is 'A' clearer than 'B'?" method of determining eyeglass prescription strengths, and use the same methods that an optometrist does, and you will end up with a Web site likely to please most of the people who see it most of the time, and that's about as good as you are going to get, considering that both esthetic and usability qualities are at least in part a matter of individual taste.