Every once in a while, it’s important to step back and evaluate how you are doing when it comes to the fundamentals of your field or industry. Because my field is Internet marketing and websites, I came up with 10 questions you can ask yourself to determine how well your site and online strategy are working.

10 Website Questions

1. What kind of Web presence do I need?

   Don’t worry too much about what kind of web presence you have just yet. Think carefully about what kind of presence you really need. Do you need an informational site, an e-commerce platform, or a community or network site? Which suits your business best?

2. What does my website need to accomplish?

   Is your site primarily meant to distribute information? Sell a product? Get subscribers? What are the end results you need to achieve?

3. Who do I want to visit my site?

   Think about your ideal audience. Are they tech-lingo-speaking engineers? C-suite managers? Teenage girls with generous spending habits? Do you need to serve more than one audience? How will you serve multiple audiences? Some reading about personas might help at this point.

4. Who is visiting my site?

   Do you really know who is visiting your site? This can be tricky to determine, but there are clues to who it is that is viewing your site. A web analytics package will go a long way in helping you to determine what content and which calls to action are resonating with your current audience. You can also ask your visitors directly—a short, online survey can do a lot to help unveil your visitors’ feelings and background.

5. How will I drive traffic to my site?

   There are many methods for driving traffic, and you need to figure out which will be most appropriate for your site and which are the highest priority. Natural search engine results? Pay-per-click ads? Viral, word-of-mouth marketing? Links from related sites? Press releases?

6. What is it that I want my visitors to do or learn?

   These actions are the baby steps towards achieving your main purpose in #2 above. Do you want your visitors to read a certain page, download a whitepaper, and then contact sales? Do you want them to read product reviews, look at a photo gallery, add a product to their cart, and check out? What are the most important actions that lead to achieving your goals?

7. How can I engage my visitors?

   Often the problem with a site is not getting visitors to come to a site, but making them stay. How can you connect with your audience and encourage them to stick around? What (small) set of calls to action are going to be used to motivate your visitors to explore, learn, and enjoy your site?

8. How can I increase repeat visits?

   How do you make a website “sticky?” Is your site a one-trick pony? Does your site have more to offer visitors at a later date?

9. How will my website be built and managed? In-house or outsourced?

   Once you’ve determined what your site needs to be, you need to think about how it will be built and maintained. Remember, it’s often the case that whatever site and system you have now is a sunk cost and therefore shouldn’t unduly influence your decision about what to do going forward.

10. What kind of website can I afford?

    Once you know what you need and want, you have to look at what you realistically can have, at least in the near term. You may have to prioritize your goals and simply try to accomplish as much as you can with your limited resources.

More Than 10 Answers

These 10 basic website questions don’t have perfect, unchanging answers, even for the same company at two different times. The best answer often changes with growth or challenges your company is facing. Each question is also open-ended, so there are multiple answers to each one. The main point is simply to think about what’s important regularly so that your company or site follows its optimal path on the web.

People are the most decisive factor in your company.

Think about it: without people, who would be running the computers, operating the machines, or answering the phones? Who would be buying anything that you sell?

I know that this is definitely an obvious observation, but I thought I would take the time to make you think about it again. It’s so obvious, and we have often thought through who is involved in our business, and thus we tend to forget that the human element is the most important element.

How Can People Be More Decisive?

What can you do to make the people involved with your company happier and more effective?

What are your customers asking for? What need can you fill for them? What pain or irritation can you remove from their lives?

What do your employees need to work more efficiently? What hampers them from meeting (or even setting!) goals? How can you help your employees to be more motivated?

Just remember to periodically look at how each part of your company affects the people involved. People will thank you.

One of the first things I do to evaluate a client’s needs is to assess his or her existing site for strengths and weaknesses. We then work on a new site plan that compensates for the weaknesses without compromising the strengths. I’ve recently been working with a new client on a site redesign and noticed something that would be helpful for all site owners to keep in mind.

The weakness that stands out the most for this particular new client is the complete lack of a sense of place—you don’t know where you are when you arrive at the site. There is no information regarding what the company does, why it is unique, or why you should choose this site over any other. There are no separate areas to the site—all of the functionality of the site is linked to from the home page, without any explanation of what each of the items is. There is not enough content to convey the site’s personality to its visitors. There is nothing about the site that would help you to understand what it is for or to make it memorable.

This site needs some index pages—pages that categorize, highlight, and explain the parts and features of the site like a tour guide pointing out historic sites on a bus ride—”On your left you’ll see the products section of the site where our fine products have been sold since 1996…”

Index Pages Make It Memorable

By grouping the site’s functions and content into a handful of areas or categories, you can help your visitors to quickly find what they are looking for and avoid “analysis paralysis.” Visitors are more likely to remember how to navigate the site and find what they are looking for if the number of (initial) options they have is reduced to a more managable number. People remember lists of between 3 and 7 items the best. Check out iKaput.com for memorable, easy navigation.

Index Pages Tell You What It Is

Once the areas or parts of your site are defined, an index page provides you with a perfect place to explain the purpose and features of a particular section of your site. By describing each of the features, you reinforce your visitors’ sense of place—they know where there are, what they are doing, and what your site is about. A good example of this principle is the education section of WhiteCanyon.com

By organizing, highlighting, and explaining the features of your site, your visitors will understand and remember your site better—just like tourists who have had a tour guide show them the sites of a city that make it unique and memorable.

When you are redesigning your web site, first take stock of the goals and functionality that you want your site to meet or have. When you know your goals and necessary functionality, you can then determine the structure of your site—the navigational structure, various site paths, and links between pages.

Think About Conversions

A conversion occurs when your site visitor takes one of the actions that you want him or her to take. These conversions, and the multiple steps (mini-conversions) that lead to them, are the whole purpose of your site. If you run an e-commerce site, the main goal is for your customers to add products to your cart and complete the entire checkout process. A forum wants users to sign up, read and make posts, and return frequently. Informational web sites want people to return and read or listen often. Some sites are designed to generate leads for salespeople.

You want to structure your site so that it is as easy and as desirable as possible for visitors to complete the desired actions—to be converted.

Think About Spiders

The easier you make it for a search engine spider to get around your site, the more pages it is going to find, index, and (hopefully) rank. If you make the link “tree” simple and easy to follow, you stand a better chance of pleasing a search engine spider.

Think About Confused People

No one is going to know your site as well as you do—click paths for actual visitors can make it seem like your visitors are drunk, lost, or just plain silly. Trust me, though, they usually (and hopefully) aren’t any of those things. They just won’t know your site very well from their initial visit. You need to make the structure or your site intuitive enough that your visitors can understand it quickly without hand-holding.

Another major problem I have seen as I have designed or redesigned web sites is that often the navigation structure is inconsistent. Inconsistency is worse than complexity. Imagine, you land on a site, click to go to a product description, click to the features page, and then want to go back to the product description. Now, though, instead of being first on the list of navigation links, it’s 4th and it’s called “product outline” or “product overview.” Huh? You will lose and confuse your visitors if navigation paths aren’t consistent.

My Basic Process

After designing many sites, I have a basic process that I follow for designing a site. Here are the main steps that I follow:

1. Define Main Areas

   Luckily, you’re not starting from scratch when you start to define the main areas of your site. In fact, there will usually be at least one area for each of the main functions of your site.

   For example, KindredLearning.com has five main functions that it’s supposed to have: store, newsletter, articles, company news, and general company information. After looking at all the different pages that we wanted to include on KindredLearning.com, we decided on six main areas: Four Year Plan (the main selling point for Kindred Learning’s entire business), Products, Newsletter, Articles, News/Updates, and About Us. We added only one area, and we did it in order to make certain educational materials on the site more prominent.

   These main areas make up the “main level” navigation of your site. Your visitors can see the main things they can do or learn about on the site in a glance from anywhere on the site.

2. Assign Pages to Areas

   The next step is to make a list of all of the pages that need to be on your site and then assign each page to one of the areas. Most of the time, it will be clear in which area a page belongs, although you will occasionally have a page that seems to belong in more than one area. It can be really tough to decide where to finally assign this page. You can make every page accessible from many places on the site, but you need to assign every page a “home.” These associations can be changed, but changes need to be made with GREAT care—changes to associations and navigation menus are the number one way to introduce navigational inconsistency into a site.

3. Set Up Levels

   Once you have all your pages assigned to the different areas, you’re ready to impose a little further structure on your site. Some pages will naturally belong to certain sub-areas or categories. You can group these pages together and then create a new “index” type of page to link to each of these pages. You can also link to pages right from the main area page. These groupings, indexes, and assignments create a hierarchy for your site, one which is hopefully clear, natural, and easy to follow.

I usually perform the task of structuring my site on a white board, a large piece of paper (the same way that Carolynn Duncan solves big problems), or an Excel spreadsheet. It usually ends up looking something like this:

Click to Enlarge

You can see the areas along the top (I really like tabbed navigation at the main level), the pages and indexes below them, and the sub pages below them. The hierarchy has worked out clearly and is usually no more than about three levels deep.

At this point, you’ve succeeded in determining the goals of your site, deciding on the functionality necessary to achieve these goals, and mapping the functions and information to a navigational wireframe.

Finally, go through the structure of your site and think about conversions, spiders, and confused people again. If your structure satisfies these needs, then you’re good to go.

DMOZ is another name for the Open Directory Project, the largest, free, human-edited directory on the web. It is constructed and maintained by volunteers from all over the globe who make submissions and edits to the listings. As the largest directory, it provides listings and results as a help or starting point for many search engines, including Google, HotBot, Lycos, Netscape, and others. Go to BruceClay.com to see a graph of how central DMOZ is to search engine results.

Google Draws Results From DMOZ

Google, like other search engines, often uses the listings and descriptions from the ODP in its results. These results and descriptions can have a powerful effect on how effective your site’s search engine results are. Wouldn’t it be nice to tell DMOZ and Google what to say about your site? To write a description that accurately describes your site and entices visitors to come?

How to Submit a Site to DMOZ:

Luckily, you can tell Google and DMOZ how to portray your site. DMOZ is edited by humans, and so to get a listing in the ODP, you need to make the humans there aware of your site (which, if your site is new or small, may not be very likely). There is a link on most DMOZ category pages for suggesting sites and descriptions for those sites. Official guidelines for the DMOZ URL suggestion tool are here.

1. Go to the category that you feel fits your site best
2. If available, click the “suggest url” link
3. Enter the web address of your site
4. Give your “elevator pitch,” the concise, accurate summary of your site that you want DMOZ to display (Make sure your description is objective and doesn’t sound promotional)

Chances are, if you make it easy for them, the editors will simply use the information you gave them and give your site a good DMOZ listing.

What to Do About a Bad DMOZ Listing:

Sometimes the editors don’t understand your site and give you a poor or incorrect listing. Sometimes your site changes and your listing needs updating. You can do one of two things about these problems:

1. Update your listing. You can update your listing by going to the category where your site is listed and clicking the “update listing” link. Make sure to clearly show the error, short coming, or change that needs to be made in your DMOZ listing.
2. Use the NOODP meta tag on your site. The NOODP meta tag allows you to ask search engines to override or ignore the ODP listing that your site has in favor of content found on the pages of your site. Matt Cutts’ blog entry shows you how to use the NOODP meta tag.

DMOZ provides what is, for the most part, a valuable service. There are allegations that the directory is flawed, spammed, or worthless, but the editors are only human. Besides, flawed, spammy, or worthless, the ODP still has a strong influence on the web and you have the tools to influence what they say about you or to avoid ill effects from potential DMOZ problems. Use DMOZ submissions as one more edge in your effort to improve your rankings and marketing message on the Internet.

Sometimes the changes we make to our web sites, businesses, or personal lives seem small, insignificant, or hardly worth the effort. It can be hard to stay motivated when all we seem to make are small, incremental improvements.There is something powerful about incremental improvements, however.

Linking Incremental Improvements

I was looking at ways to improve some web sites recently, and a powerful realization hit me.

Incremental improvements are linked to each other.

Almost nothing happens in our businesses or lives that doesn’t affect some other part of our lives. One event’s output is the input for another event or process.

The Math of Incremental Improvements

Here’s some math to illustrate the principle. Let’s say that you work hard and make a 10 percent improvement in the amount of traffic that arrives at your web site. Because there are 10 percent more people on you site, you would expect your revenue to go up by about 10 percent (assuming the quality of traffic is the same).

Now let’s say that you made the same incremental improvement in how many people make it to the product or catalog pages. You get a formula like this:

1.10 Traffic x 1.10 Catalog = 1.21 Revenue

The incremental improvements are multiplicative, which means that you get a one percent bonus (21 percent instead of 20) increase.

Daisy Chains

The power of incremental improvements really starts to stack up when you have many steps that you can improve. Let’s say you also make a 10 percent improvement in the number of visitors who put items in the shopping cart, order size, and order completion.

1.10 Traffic x 1.10 Catalog x 1.10 Add Items x 1.10 Order Size x 1.10 Completion = 1.6105 Revenue

You get a whopping 61.05% (not just 50%) improvement in revenue by improving five steps by 10 percent.

You Can Make Incremental Changes

Incremental changes are often much easier to make than huge, landscape-altering changes. In fact, the expense and difficulty of making huge changes can eat away at the benefits of such a large change.

Set achievable goals, work at them bit by bit, and remember how powerful making multiple incremental changes to your site, business, or life can be.

One of my ongoing projects is to help out with my parents’ web site, www.kindredlearning.com. We sell home school and family curriculum, books, projects, and supplies. The site has a very loyal following of repeat customers, and it helps my parents to serve other families and to earn a little money on the side.

As you can see, the web site itself needs a little help. It’s still using the same template that I made for it in an afternoon nearly 3 years ago. The site is also hosted with a company that provides a WYSIWYG editor, but this editor is very clumsy and slow, and it severely constrains your access to resources to “keep you from messing things up.” For example, we don’t have access to an FTP server, there are no server-side includes of any sort, and it’s impossible to override the CSS that’s built into the system. The list goes on and on.

We decided not long ago that, since our knowledge of search engine optimization and web design are drastically greater than when we first started the site, we are going to switch hosting and redesign the web site.

Web Site Redesign

What’s it take to redesign a web site? I have a long list of things I know that I will have to change. There are also a lot of things that I’m sure we’ll find out along the way.

Because nearly every company will have to perform a web site redesign at some time, I’m going to try and document the whole process of rebuilding Kindred Learning’s site from the ground up so that you can learn from my mistakes and successes and get your web site redesign right.

I’m going to create a new category of posts specifically for web site redesign projects and discussions. Check out “Web Site Redesign” for my posts and progress redesigning Kindred Learning and other sites.

Web analytics are an increasingly important part of how you run your Internet marketing efforts. Long gone are the days of flying a tempermental biplane with a scarf and goggles—you need radar, infrared, and afterburners.

Elite Web Analytics

Many Internet marketers work for large clients and need the best analytics that money can buy. Omniture’s client list proves that its Site Catalyst is definitely in this category.

Budget Web Analytics

Some of us need as much horse power as we can afford. Our financial position or the smaller size of our clients dictates that we choose something less than top-of-the-line. Clicktracks Analyzer runs $495 a user license (as of Jan. 06). The advantage of Clicktracks is that it’s a one-time purchase of software that you can use forever after.

Free Web Analytics

You don’t have to publicly admit it, but your web analytics plane may look more like a paper airplane—you may not have any budget for analytics at all. There are a few solutions that are reputable, like Google Analytics and StatCounter. Google has had to stop accepting new subscriptions because of the volume of demand, and so StatCounter seems to be the next best choice.

Flight Lessons

Whatever solution you choose, make sure that your web analytics solution can generate reports in real time. Waiting to see the effects of a change can be detrimental to your business, or very boring. You don’t want your plane to stall.

Learn what the statistics mean. I will be including some of them later, but for now you can just use a search engine to find them.

Aces

Any of you statistics aces out there who have “shot down” multiple web analytics packages or who have found a favorite way to fly, feel free to comment—help the novices get off the ground. What’s your favorite analytics package and why?

Conversion rates are tricky because they’re tied to people’s “feeling” about a web site—a site just feels right or it doesn’t. When people are asked why, sometimes they can’t even tell you.

Internet marketers do have one advantage—they can test different versions of everything. One of the things they have learned is to include items on their pages that add credibility to their site.

Credibility Elements That Boost Conversions

So what kind of credibility “items” can you put on a page to increase its conversion rate?

• Security Verification

  There are different services, like VeriSign and GeoTrust, that verify (and often provide) web site security. When you have passed their security inspection, they allow you to place a logo on your site that says you have been verified. People trust sites with these kind of logos more.

• Testimonials and References

  Even though sometimes they seem hokey or contrived, testimonials that compliment your site or services really do help. Testimonials that are honest about problems and how they were resolved are especially powerful. References are even better—when your visitors can personally verify that a third party thinks your service is great, they are nearly sold already.

• Awards

  If you’ve won any awards, mention and prominently display them on your site. They say to your visitor, “not only is this company trustworthy, it is exceptional.”

• Press Articles

  Positive mentions in any sort of press can be powerful credibility elements for your site. Include a link to the article or even get permission to reproduce it on your site.

• Varied Payment Options

  Offering varied payment options is not only convenient for your customers, it says that your business is real enough to be able to accept many methods. Display logos of credit cards, PayPal, etc., that you accept.

• A Phone Number and Address

  Businesses that have a phone number people can use to talk to a real person are more trustworthy, even if people never use the number. A physical address and/or mailing address has the same effect. Include a page with contact information on your site.

• In Business Since…

  If you’ve been in business for more than about 2 or 3 years, then you have earned more trust—you’re the real deal and you’re not going anywhere. Mention the date your firm was established somewhere.

• Privacy Policy

  Privacy policies are often required by law, and even when they’re not, people really appreciate knowing how you are going to use, secure, and respect their private information. After you’ve written your privacy policy, you’d better stick to it—not following it would be a violation of trust and would lose you those customers for life.

Conversion Rates Go Up With Trust

When people trust you, they are more likely to convert. Work to earn people’s trust and they will reward you with their attention and their money.

As you continue on your quest to imrove the conversion rate of your site and pages, there are some principles that you should keep in mind.

People Read From Left to Right

If your web site is going to be in English or one of the many other languages that are read left to right, then you need to remember that your visitors will typically see something in the left half of the page first, and that they will probably start reading on that half of the page.

This doesn’t mean that they are blind to the right side of the page. Well placed headers and images can draw their attention to important areas of the right side of the page.

What this means is that you should consider placing your most important items on the left half of the page. If you want to increase the likelihood that your visitors will see something, include it where they will start reading.

People Read From Top to Bottom

This point is along the same lines as the last one. People usually see what’s on the top of the page first. Include your most important items in the top half of your page. These two principles are the reason that left or top navigation menus are usually the most effective for helping your visitors to navigate your site.

What is the Golden Triangle?

The golden triangle is the area of the screen that visitors see most. It starts in the top left corner, goes to the top right of the page, and then cuts down to the bottom left. Items in this area are more likely to be seen, as is shown in heat map 1 and heat map 2. As you get further right or further down the page, items are less and less likely to be seen.

You can use this principle for many presentation, writing, and graphical design projects. Even your resume can receive a boost if you place the most important information in the Golden Triangle.

How Do Newspapers Affect the Web?

Newspapers are large, folded sheets of paper. Often, the only page that gets read is the front page, in the area that doesn’t require the reader to unfold or open the newspaper. This area is called “above the fold.” The most important information and headlines have to be include here or people may never see it.

On the web, the area above the fold is the area that visitors see on your page without having to click or scroll. Your most important information generally goes in this area. Attention spans are short, so you have to grab visitors’ attention quickly when they come to your site.

Why Shouldn’t Newspapers Affect the Web?

Back in the early days of the web, people who weren’t familiar with the net didn’t know to scroll down. Now days, about 60% of your audience will scroll down at least a little bit to see what’s further down the page.

This means that, although the area above the fold is still the most important, you still need to pay very close attention to areas below the fold on your web site. Scrolling down a web page is easier than unfolding the newspaper and a lot more people will do it than used to. Don’t let the design of newspapers and books dictate what you do on the web—it’s a different medium with many different rules, and it should be treated as such.