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Your Visitor-Friendly Web Site Checklist

More and more, users are demanding simple, fast, easy-to-use web sites. They want a visitor-friendly experience, and they want it now. The following questions address basic web design issues that encourage visitor friendly experiences. They don't address promoting your site, "backend" of e-commerce sites or customer relationship management.  

Is your strategy visitor friendly? 

• Have you clearly defined the company's primary objective for the site? In his course Make Your Site Sell marketing master Ken Evoy describes this as defining the "most wanted response" you want from your site  visitors. He masterfully lays out how to define it, refine it and execute it.
• Have you identified target visitors...the ideal customer?  These are the folks who can take action based on the information they find on your site.
• Have you built the site around your ideal customer? (And not to make your company "look good"? ) Is the customer truly the star of this show?
• Does your site help visitors get what they want and lead to the company's main objectives? Every element of your site should be evaluated in terms of how well it leads visitors toward your primary objective -- while providing a positive visitor experience.
• Does the visitor experience bring them back, and keep them from going to competitors by being quick, easy and meaningful to your ideal customer?  Repeat business is the name of the game. This can be a difficult metric to measure at times. but it is a worthy of serious thought on the part of any web site owner. 
• Have you made it drop-dead easy for visitors to take action? If they can't easily and comfortably take the action you desire they won't.  

Is your web built on a web-solid foundation?

• Is the underlying technology the most functional approach to enhancing the visitor experience? For example, if it doesn't require using databases, unnecessary plug-ins or irrelevant Java applets or rich media, don't use them. 
• Is your site search engine friendly? Have the proper meta tags been created? Is the keyword density helping search engines rank you well? (The software package Web Position Gold can check this automatically.) Have the proper title tags, image alt tags and your physical address been included? Have you avoided using frames (and databases where possible)? 
• Is your web a congruent extension of your company? Is it consistent in form and substance with other marketing materials and  media used by your company? 
• Does the visitor experience fortify and build your brand?  Branding on the web is as important as anywhere else. As the levels of sophistication  on the internet rise, branding is moving to the forefront in terms of marketing imperatives. 
• Have you replicated what works for others instead of reinventing the wheel? Millions of dollars have been thrown at the internet proving what does and doesn't work. Much of what has been learned is now readily available. For instance Ken Evoy's Make Your Site Sell  course distills what works...from real world web experience in a course that even the newest novice can follow like a roadmap. (Click on the web addresses at the bottom of the page to visit some of the busiest and best sites on the net today.)  
• Does your site avoid the two top complaints from web surfers today? Those complaints are not finding what they are looking for on specific sites and broken links. Broken links often crop up when webs undergo changes. 

Is navigating your site easier than reading a map?

• Is site navigation so easy to see, understand and use that it's hard to get lost? Easy navigation sounds like a no-brainer, but just look at how many sites you visit that almost hide navigation links...sometimes even requiring visitors to drill down 2, 3, or 4 clicks to find them.
• Is site navigation based on what visitors want and not on not how your company is organized? Visitors don't care how your company is functionally or physically organized. They want things they are interested in to be logically placed on your site and drop-dead easy to find.
• Can a visitor easily navigate your site from any page within the site? Unlike a retail store or a book folks don't always come in the front door or start at the beginning. They can and will enter your site from any of its pages. Not only that, they don't follow any sequence in visiting pages. Every page must  lead to wherever the visitor wants to go.
• Are navigation bars and links consistent in appearance and location across the entire site.   Can a visitor tell at a glance that they are still on your site by the color scheme and the look and location of navigation bars. 

Do you tell 'em and sell 'em the right way? 

• Does your site honor research indicating that text is still the king on the net today. The Poynter Institute eye tracking studies in news oriented sites clearly indicate that visitors see text sooner and more often than graphics.
• Does your site's copy get to the point quickly, clearly and concisely? If it takes 300 words to say it in print, can it be done in 150 words for the web? 
• Does your copy talk to visitors in their terms? Does it use  familiar words instead of  trade or technical jargon?
• Is your copy "objective" to the extent that visitors won't be turned-off by hype?  Recall studies show that when web site visitors felt they were being strongly "pitched" or had to wade through hype it slowed down their reading speed and dropped their recall rates. 
• Can visitors scan the copy and get the key points quickly? Have you used headlines, subheads, bold or highlighted text and bulleted  or numbered lists to make the copy easy to scan? Few visitors read all of the copy. Most scan and move on...or click off if it's too difficult to grab the information on the run.
• Have you used an experienced copywriter, or followed proven guidelines for writing web copy? One of the best guides available today is Make Your Words Sell, by veteran copywriters Joe Robson and Ken Evoy.
• Does the text on every page contrast clearly against an easy to view background? Is reading text easy on the eye? Make it hard to read text with a low-contrast background color and visitors won't read it. The best combinations are black text on white or very light colored backgrounds or white text on black or very dark backgrounds (a distant second).

A picture isn't always worth a thousand words...

• Does your site design work within the constraints of small screens, slow modems, older browsers and low-tech users? Faster bandwidth availability is growing rapidly, but user adoption of these technologies isn't keeping pace. A large portion of internet visitors still use less than optimal equipment and software.   
• Are the graphics small, few and supportive of the selling copy and the site's primary objective?  Do you have enough graphics to get the job done without being graphics heavy in any way?
• If the visitor experience is enhanced by large graphics, such as zooming in on a product image, are large images one click away on a separate page? Some sites sell goods that must be seen to be appreciated and purchased. No question about that. Thumbnail images work wonders for speeding up load time and give visitors an easy way to see larger images.
• Have the "aesthetic" graphics that promote the brand image been used sparingly? Have you avoided the trap of placing so much emphasis on visual image and effects that you hurt functionality and overshadow the real value of the internet...providing information. 
• Have distracting screen elements been destroyed before they see the light of day? These include text tickers that don't serve4 a legitimate purpose or enhance the visitor experience, irrelevant animated graphics, visually offensive background colors,  or any other element that doesn't support your primary objective and enhance the visitor experience. You want your visitors to flow  through the entire process, not be or distracted, annoyed or hindered by anything.
• If you are using high-tech bells and whistles is it only because it significantly enhances the visitor experience? Do rich media presentations enhance the visitor experience enough to offset slow load times that drive visitors away?  
• Do your pages load quickly? Does something show on the page in 8 to 10 seconds or less and the entire page load in 30 seconds or less on a 28k modem? 

How does your site compare to the best on the net?

The list below contains the addresses of sites that get the heaviest traffic, are recognized for their quick load times, or have user-friendly interfaces. Here's a test. Visit them one after another, then load your own site in another browser window. Then click back and forth between browsers see how you compare to each of the sites below. (* Indicates more than one category)

High Traffic Sites:   AOL, Excite,  Hotmail, Lycos*, MSN, Netscape,  Yahoo* eBay

Fast Loading Sites: Alta Vista, Apple Computer, Charles Schwab*, Dell Computer*, Fidelity*, Gateway Computer, Infoseek (Go), Lotus*, Lycos, Microsoft*, Oracle, Sun Microsystems, Yahoo*

User Friendly Business- to-Consumer Sites: American Greetings, Ameritrade, Charles Schwab*, Compaq Computer, Dell Computer*, Drugstore.com eToys, E*Trade, eBay, Egghead, Fidelity*, Half.com, Homestore, JCP Media, Microsoft*, Skyauction, Travelocity, WWF 

User Friendly Business- to-Business Sites:  3Com, Cisco Systems, GTE, FedEx, Hewlett Packard, IBM, iPrint, Intuit, Mail.com, McAfee, Symantec, UPS,