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enhancing web site effectiveness

Article adapted from "Basic Elements and Best Practices for Web Sites" by PricewaterhouseCoopers LLP

In the dynamic world of both personalized and static Web sites, there are certain elements that are critical to Web site effectiveness. These elements are to a Web site what knowing protocol is to a diplomat; they will not guarantee winning a negotiation, but without them, it can be difficult to even get an audience. The elements are:

• Knowing Your Customers
• Determining Purpose and Content
• Monitoring Effectiveness
• Developing an Appropriate House Style

Knowing Your Customers
An essential aspect of knowing an organization's purpose involves knowing its customers. Just because the Web reaches millions of people does not ensure that they are all customers, any more than saturating a city with leaflets guarantees attracting people who will eventually buy a product. A message that appeals to everyone will be so diluted that it may not appeal to the target group.

Who are the customers for the business and what are they doing on the Net? Why are they there and what do they hope to gain from being there? These are questions that need to be answered before designing the words and pictures to satisfy an organization's customers. Any medium of mass communication, including television, newspapers or the Web, can seduce businesses into thinking that they are communicating with their desired audience. This is not necessarily the case. Leaders in the direct mail industry learned long ago that the most important element of communication is the target audience.

Companies should not prevent anyone from visiting at least the opening page of their site, but should not expect to satisfy everyone's needs and should not exert the effort to try to do so. Instead, organizations should evaluate the nature of the people who go further into their site while creating reasonable obstacles to impede the progress of the casual observer. It is important not to clutter a critical company database with thousands of people who have no real interest in the business. The "gate" to prevent this from occurring may be a registration page, a membership fee or even the specificity of the content. Either way, it is essential to measure the quality of the visitors and see if it matches the target customers.

Determining Purpose and Content
Every effective communication has a clearly stated purpose known to both the creator and the audience. Effective articles begin with a purpose and the Web is no different. Organizations should immediately communicate to their customers the purpose of the Web site and what it will do for them.

The problem is often defining the purpose in the first place. Many Web designers fall into the same trap as other poor marketing communicators. They feel that their presence alone is purpose enough, that "awareness" is sufficient. With all the investment required to create and maintain an effective site, simply being there is not going to provide an adequate return to the company. It is important to convince the visitor to respond in accordance to the organization's desired objectives. This is no different than traditional effective marketing communications.

Monitoring Effectiveness
Once the purpose of the site is clearly defined, an e-Business can begin monitoring the site's effectiveness and use the resulting information to improve the site. The key approaches to monitoring effectiveness include:

• Observing behavior on the site. Observing customer's behavior as they navigate the site can tell the business if customers are going to the right areas and reveal their preferences. It can also track if they consistently log off at a certain point. This presents an opportunity for organizations to learn from observed customer behavior on the site. For example, a company offers its customers a downloadable file that matches customer interest. During the offering, the file does not get downloaded often and it becomes apparent that customers do not want to download it because the file is too large and takes too much time to download. With this information, the company could cut the file into smaller pieces that download in increments of fifteen seconds, in accordance with customer preferences. Additionally, the organization could help their customers along, by advising them of what the downloading process will consist of and the timing associated with it.
• Tracking whether customers return to the site. The fundamental objective of any organization is to generate repeat business, as few organizations survive by interacting with customers only once. By measuring return hits and looking at behavior during return visits, companies can quickly turn that data into useful information. For example, knowing that 20% of first-time users become repeat customers and 15% of them consistently log off at certain points can be useful in designing a frequent customer incentive program.

Developing a House Style
House styles are the arranged visual elements that reflect the customer's preferences, the Web site's purpose, and the site's relevant content. The Web site must have a house style, much like a publishing house has for its books and journals. The choice of house style elements is a relatively minor consideration, but it must be appropriate for the audience's needs.

Having an aesthetically pleasing site is no longer an art form; it is just another condition for doing business. Decisions to use a certain typeface or certain graphics should be driven by an organization's understanding of the customer and the purpose of the page.

There are also simple design conventions that need to be followed, just as there are on a printed page. One of the most important rules to consider is integrity. The material, whether it is a Web site or a book, needs to have integrity and consistency. Once an audience has become accustomed to a certain style, they depend on it to find the information they need. Unfortunately, many Web sites appear to suffer from innovation overload, where a variety of designers have free rein to design whatever pages they like within the same site, analogous to using different typefaces for different chapters of a book.

This phenomenon stems from what Internet researcher J. M. Artz describes as an "evolutionary" approach to Web development. He argues that the weakness of this approach is that participants are all involved in a joint experiment or learning experience. "Consequently, evolving prototypes often suffer from several common problems, including the failure to meet business objectives; design conflicts resulting from conflicting purposes; inconsistent look and feel; data synchronization problems; data update problems; maintenance difficulties; and complex and confusing interfaces."

If these problems sound familiar, a top-down organization might be appropriate. Applied to a house style, this would mean that all designers must follow certain designated designs. For example, this design would specify that each Web page must start with an introduction; contain horizontal rules every three paragraphs, two image links, a "last-updated" note and a feedback e-mail section. The target audience on the Web has a certain level of expectations; imposing such rules ensures that they are met at each stage.

Conclusion
In order to present content effectively, an e-Business must know and understand its customers and define the purpose of the site. It must then design the site in a uniform way that fits with its customers and the business's purpose. The best-managed Web sites deliver value to customers in a way that captures the users' attention, encourages them to take desired action (e.g., purchase a product) and makes them want to return in the future. Incorporating the key elements presented above can help e-Businesses achieve this goal.