Pointers on how to create business websites that work

We put up this part of the website in 1995. The internet was more like a pond than an ocean. (Netscape 0.9, remember?)

We haven't had to retract much. And we haven't changed our simple page layout (more on that later). But there are always new things to add, including occasional hard evidence that comes in. Meanwhile, the questions stay the same: What works out there? Can anyone prove it?

By Jim Heath at Viacorp Pty Ltd.

Things that help
Things that probably don't help
One toss-up
Anyway, how do you GET them to the website?
A website can't do everything
Getting paid, if you're selling something
Protecting your copyrights
What next?

9 Nov 2008: Added a link to a comprehensive and practical review: "Search Engine Optimization and User Behavior".

Things that help

Fast-loading pages, and easy navigation

Instead, this happens: you're moving through the web, but keep getting stuck waiting for something to load. Twenty seconds, thirty seconds... you give up. Whatever that page was about, you'll never know -- and don't care anymore.

Or you find the exact page you're looking for, then ignore the rest of the site. You click off somewhere else. Because one glance at the site's navigation system made you wince. Too hard to figure out.

Those things seem obvious, right? But why are some pages slow-loading? Why are there websites with baffling navigation? What could the designers have been thinking?

We might guess about the slow-loading pages: wishful thinking. "Surely people will wait to see this!"

Page speed

Slim the graphics on your site, and offer a text-only option. If you can't do anything else, at least warn people: Click here to see our range of soup tureens (23meg, but worth waiting for).

Think this no longer matters, because we all have broadband and 3-GHz computers? Wrong -- if you're using a PDA. "The site was simply overrun with trivial, bloated pages. By the time I parsed through them all on my portable device I probably could have walked to the video store rather than driven." From The Cranky User: my not-so-invisible enemy [page bloat].

Navigation

There's no standard for navigation yet. It took about a century to sort out the way printed books were organised: title, contents page -- even simple organisation like that. So allowing for the mad rate of internet development, we may need another ten years for standard web-navigation to evolve.

Meanwhile, why not follow the lead of a big site that works well for you?

If you're trying to organise an enormous website, have a look at the WEB STYLE GUIDE, 2nd edition. It might have been called "The practical Webmaster's guide to taming a sprawling site."

And here's an old email exchange we had about all this with author Mary E. S. Morris, former webmaster at Sun Microsystems. A lot of this applies to Intranets as well.

Here's one that works

Here's a gigantic but fast-loading corporate site, with easy navigation. It also works just fine if you turn your browser's graphics off: General Electric .

There are many other good examples, but one is probably enough.

Do one thing well, then stop

When Amazon.com started, it flowed like a powerful current between high banks. You went there to buy books, or find out about books. All the site's skill was bent to help visitors do that.

Gradually it spread out like the Amazon river delta -- books, and everything else. (Or maybe everything else, and books.) Which makes your eyes go out of focus, no matter what the marketing people at Amazon.com might say about their strategy. Ditto for all those other gigantic sites that spread out, and out, and out.

Here's a bookseller that's a mile deep, and only one inch wide: Bibliofind. As soon as you land there, you breathe gratefully again about the web. (Amazon must have liked it too. They bought it, but left it as it was.)

Free and useful information

Federal Express lets you track packages you've sent. Or packages sent to you, if the sender tells you the tracking number.

Fixing a bad corporate image

Why not put up an FAQ about it? The Gorbachev technique: "We know that a lot of people think such and such, but they're overlooking some important things...." Then the hard questions follow, each with a mollifying and coherent answer. If what you say makes sense (which assumes you have a sensible case), you'll get respect from stating it plainly and without raising your voice.

Example from the Perth Mint. Straightforward answers to questions like "Why should I trust the Mint or the Government?" and "How confidential are my Depository transactions?"

Interesting but seemingly useless facts

Here's the biggest missed opportunity: the business doesn't take you behind the scenes and tell you how their product is made or their service works.

And let's not accept excuses that there's nothing to say. There's always something interesting to say -- but the people running the companies or handling the PR are too close to see it anymore.

How is the lettering put on the bottles? Where does the clay for the bricks come from? What glue is used to stick the aircraft wings together? Do they keep all the capacitors in stock, or buy them from suppliers in step with orders for the PCs? How do they guarantee the quality of the assembly work? What technical problems have they mastered, and how did they do it? And on and on.

Seemingly useless facts can say a hell of a lot about product quality, pride in the work, teamwork, corporate energy, ingenuity, the care taken to help customers, and a thousand other things.

Also, offering clearly-written descriptions that will help kids with their homework is wonderful PR with their parents. And who are their parents? Your customers, maybe?

Hard-working graphics

Here's an old-time website that would die without the product photos: Total Flower Exports. Not a fancy site, but it's a relief to see something so straight-forward. It's a quietly convincing way of saying: this is for real -- we don't have to puff anything up.

We'd better mention the dog that didn't bark: where are our graphics, on this site? Well, what would you like to see? This is an article, with lots of examples (links). If any photo or illustration might have made anything clearer, we'd have put it in. Otherwise, why make you wait for pointless graphics to download? (No one's ever complained to us: Hey, where's your logo!?)

Regular changes

Warning: it can be a long pain to produce a news section that will be valuable to people. At first, news ideas seem as endless as Spring buds. But soon enough, people wince or scurry away when they see the news editor asking around for ideas. (Unless your news section connects to an external power source -- like ever-changing tax laws).

If your executives give well-researched public speeches, then use those. Like this one about what multinationals are now facing with their ageing work forces. If you work for a big company, read it! (And then reflect how it affected you: Alcoa's company image went up a bit, right?)

But note: you don't need changes in a website that's designed as a single stop. A corporate-image website, for example: it may be classy or it may be rough and down-to-earth, but it probably isn't meant to be a website to return to. The idea is to introduce the company, stamp in an image, and leave it there.

And also note: you don't need changes if the site has a useful database and there's no way people could see it all the first time. (Like the 20 million titles at Bibliofind -- people will go back again and again, even without any newsletter bait.)

Things that probably don't help

Graphics that are too far-out, or only there to get attention

     Seekers after novelty hang dolphins in trees,
     Float a boar in the sea.

     - Horace

Meanwhile, Flash seems to encourage designers to create gaudy and pointless whirligigs. If it's only done to attract attention -- look out, because that rarely seems to work with other advertising 'effects'.

Painting out the text

It's conceivable this is done to attract people to the text. So they'll read the message, take it in, and act on it (if the text urges action). That would be the charitable explanation of this approach.

Lots of luck.

Ask yourself: would you set up your screen so that it normally showed text over some patterned background? So you'd always read your word-processing and email and spreadsheet with that pattern behind it?

No? Then why do it on your website? Do you want the text to be read? If not, what's it there for?

Tests on the legibility of ordinary printed text are conclusive: black-on-white works best. Dark colours on white are next best. And so on, with rankings through every combination of text colour and background colour.

The research results matter. For example: simply print an ad in reverse (white on black), and the response rate usually drops sharply (by 50%, in one case reported by David Ogilvy).

We don't know if black-on-white is best for computer screens. But some research we tracked from Scientific American suggests it's true.

High Art

There stands the commercial artist, wanting the layout to look glorious, arresting, sublime. The marketing guy blinks and asks: "Does it sell?"

In print advertising, the numbers that come out of strict tests support the marketing guy. High art doesn't usually help sell anything (except art galleries, maybe).

Big players like Reader's Digest pick a test city and run competing ads in ways that avoid statistical bias ("split-run" tests). The winning ad has the most returned orders. That done, the full campaign can start. It doesn't rely one jot on the feelings of the ad-creators. It relies on the already-measured response of the audience Out There.

There's a telling story about a new art director who tried to apply what he'd learned in art school. "His first consideration in selecting an illustration was that it should be as similar as possible to the painting of the old masters. The result was that his advertisements brought Oooos! and Aaaas! of delight from other art directors." (John Caples, Tested Advertising Methods.)

But the art director had a practical lobe in his brain. He knew that his job was to sell things. So he showed his creations to taxi drivers, secretaries, clerks, mechanics, and shopkeepers. He also showed them samples deliberately made to look like mail-order ads. Guess what? Everyone preferred the mail-order stuff. "Sometimes the rules of fine art must be completely reversed in producing an effective advertisement."

Caples warns: "Many advertising artists are still in the mental stage that this art director was in before he started showing advertisements to average people."

OK. Point made.

We used to give a link to a high-art website. Now there are so many, each trying to out-dazzle the others or put them down, it's pointless to single one out. Anyway, it seems they're all wrong. Evidence has arrived like a pie in the face: a research group monitored a selection of web users as they tried to navigate a variety of fancy and plain sites. One conclusion: the artwork rarely makes any difference, one way or the other! All that work and artistic posturing, and it makes no difference to the value people get from a site (if they arrived looking for information). Animations did make a difference... they slowed some people down. Not because they were enthralled. No. They ignored the content of animations. They were sometimes slowed down waiting for the page to "finish loading."

Links within a page also confused some users. They would scroll down and read something, then return to the top and select the same part again from the table of contents -- because the link colour hadn't changed. (Like this page is constructed -- and we've given up wondering what to do about it.)

Image maps also baffled people.

What didn't confuse them was clearly written text, with the main message right up front. And well-labelled links: a link needs to spell out exactly where it will take a visitor. Otherwise, more confusion.

A summary of the report is probably still at Surprises on the Web: Results from Usability Testing. If not, try searching on the title. It may be archived somewhere by the time you read this.

Jokes

Sex

Hit counters

Or why design a website that gives a cordial, one-on-one feeling, and then blurt out: "Welcome to Sincere Systems. You are visitor 3197 today."

The psychology seems haywire.

Why not just keep the hit-count to yourself? You can have a counter without anyone knowing it's there. But more: you can have traffic-logging software that tells you which domains your visitors came from and how they moved through your site -- even the search words they used to get there, if they arrived from a search engine. Wonderful information for tuning up your site. There's a good package that's free (www.xav.com/scripts/axs/).

One toss-up

Should a long page be downloaded to the browser, or just parts of it?

Advantages of downloading it all : it makes it easy for people to print the whole document, if they want to do that. It spares them having to click and click and click through a document, just to get small sections. And it lets them quickly search the whole thing.

Disadvantages : if the page scrolls down 50 screens, it may infuriate some people to have it all thrown in their face. Anyway, it can be confusing finding your way around a long page like that: there's presumably an index of topics at the top, and clicking on an item there takes you down into the document -- maybe way down. To get back up to the top, you either have to scroll, or use a return-to-the-beginning link (if they're offered). It can be irritating: ALL the way back up to the top again, to check the index and see where you are.

Well?

It must depend on the length of the document, how well it flows on, and the amount of graphics. We set up the page you're reading to download in one go, because there are no graphics and we thought that people might like to scroll through the whole text (for a quick survey) or print it and read it later.

Anyway, how do you GET them to the website?

Here are the chief ways people get to a commercial website:

1. The website-owner advertises the URL. The http address is on the company's letterhead and in their ordinary print ads. It's getting rare to see a print ad without a URL.

2. A prospect asks for your web address. It's a common business use of websites: electronic brochures you "hand out" by telling prospects where to look on the web. And it puts customers in control. They can decide how much of your website they want to look at -- or interact with, if it's that kind of site.

3. They Google to your site. Google works in smart ways and gets rid of most junk hits. If people find your site at the top of a Google list, you must have done something impressive. Because Google high-ranks a site if it has lots of links to it from other sites -- and those sites are also well-linked, and so on, back and back. That and other Google algorithms means it's hard to artificially promote a website. Also dangerous: your website could be banned from the Google index. See Quality guidelines -- Google Information for Webmasters. Also, here's a comprehensive review of search engine optimization, written for an encyclopaedia: Search Engine Optimization and User Behavior. It will spare you futile hours on things that don't work, and put you on the right track.

4. They come from a Goggle-sponsored ad that you've paid for. Like the following, for example, paid for by someone and generated by Google using the content of this web page you're reading. The ads even adjust for the country you're in. (You can only see the ads if you have javascript turned on. Then try using a proxy server in another country, if you know how to, and watch the changes!)...

5. They arrive at your website from an ad that you've placed on some other business website, for a fee. Some business websites welcome these ads. Others normally don't (including us). But we accepted the following one as an example of this direct way to promote websites:

6. They Yahoo their way there. The way you get a site into Yahoo is to build one that's useful to people. And then present it the right way to the Yahoo staff.

7. They read about the site somewhere else. A magazine article. Or a link from another website. Mouth-watering, because someone else has recommended the site. So the prospect already believes. PR can nudge these articles and links along, but that will only work if the website has value. (Otherwise, why would anyone say anything good about it?)

8. The website is mentioned in blogs or chat rooms. If it's mentioned in a positive way -- OK. Some blogs are bigger than most cities and a plug there means a lot of website hits. You can openly present your business in chat rooms, if you pick the groups skilfully, if you say something on-topic and if you have the right touch. But don't get your hopes too high. And it's dangerous country. Chat rooms are irritable and can snap into jihad-mode. (An old-style chat room slaughtered Intel, and they can slaughter you). Sly types -- usually at the cyber-peddler level -- sometimes pose as several people and fake discussions in chat rooms to work in a plug for their website. But people delight in exposing that.

9. People recommend your site to their friends. If your site is any good, this happens automatically.

A website can't do everything

A website can't usually replace a company's ordinary advertising. Take this example: we did a writing job for a Canadian business, but it was for an old-fashioned brochure. The brochure was mailed out to advertise webcast training for physicians. Snail mail to get doctors to something on the web.

But what else, really, could these Internet trainers do? If they sent out a printed brochure, it would at least get to the busy doctors on their list. And if the brochure was skilfully done, there was a good chance that doctors would at least glance through it. And maybe they'd visit the advertised website too. Otherwise, how could the company advertise their seminar? Get email addresses and then spam the doctors? Or hope their website alone would "announce" the seminar? Only someone simple would expect those things to work.

Getting paid, if you're selling something

If you're ready to set up a credit-card system for collecting money from website customers, you'll be trusting people to set it up for you. If you don't even know what to ask about, or where the possible hazards are, you'll truly be trusting them a great deal. This is too hairy a topic to go into here, but if you want to plunge into security questions, you could tackle How electronic encryption works.

Protecting your copyrights

One way to prove you had it at a certain time is to send a copy to yourself in a registered letter, then not open it when it arrives. Or leave a sealed copy with your lawyer. You can print out your whole website and do that.

It also helps if you save your drafts and notes. They can be used as evidence that you actually did the work.

If someone copies something from your website without your permission, then you may have a legal remedy against the person. Maybe. If the material they copied was in fact protected by copyright law, if the person wasn't using it under a "fair use" provision, and if you can identify the villain. These legal issues have been tugged in all directions by every wild force on the net. Whole copyrighted books have been defiantly posted to newsgroups (through anonymous remailers). Some hotly-contested documents have been available from FTP sites in Beijing (no less).

For more on infringement and what's going on, the Copyright and Fair Use site at Stanford is busy and encyclopaedic. There's legal stuff, proposed legislation, and lots of the latest wrangles. And here's a voluminous Copyright FAQ .

Solutions to the wrangles may be found, but don't expect anything soon. Meanwhile, you have to consider whether it matters if people spread some of your material without your permission. Maybe it doesn't. Maybe you would even like that.

Most commercial websites include copyright notices. That puts people on notice, and gives the company a starting point if there are violations they're worried about. If you want to contemplate a lot of legal vectors, for example, click Alcoa World Alumina's Legal link at the bottom.

We do routine searches for some of the phrases we use on this website. If we find someone who's lifted some of the paragraphs, we start by sending an email like this.

What next?

Maybe you know something we don't

... sort of: "Don't think I don't know what's not happening!"

Which means we'd like to hear more about what's not happening with websites. Any 'improvement' you made to a website and it didn't work.

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