Because your business model and visitors are not the same as Amazon’s, your site should be different too. Websites tend to be unique, which means their features and solutions should be tailored to fit their specific context.

Amazon Has a Really Weird Business Model

Recently I was looking into buying a new record player (not everything in a developer’s life has to be digital), so of course I went to Amazon.com. While I was on a product page, I noticed something really strange.

Amazon places ads from other companies on their product pages – for the same product! This is crazy, as they are literally encouraging you to buy from a competitor. Except it’s not crazy. Their business model ensures they make more on the ads they sell than they lose in business through these links. Additionally, most users would rather pay a little more to shop with Amazon, because they are so familiar with the brand (and because they know that Amazon provides excellent customer service after the purchase).

Amazon can get away with putting external ads on their own product pages because of their unique business model. Since you are not Amazon, you might want to think twice about employing the same strategy.

Amazon Gets a Lot of Traffic

Mention the idea of online reviews, and everyone thinks of Amazon. In fact, I know people who will go to Amazon to look at reviews for a product they’re going to buy offline at a store. We can definitely copy Amazon’s reviews, right?

Amazon gets millions of visitors every day. It’s a good idea to keep this in mind, because only about one in 1,300 purchasers (not visitors) writes a review – that’s a robust 0.07% of people who bought the product. It gets worse. Amazon actually uses the ingenious “Was this review helpful to you?” question to prioritize its reviews and keep the best at the top, and only about one in 7,300 purchasers (a healthy 0.0014%) answers it. This prioritizing is what makes Amazon’s review system so great – they don’t actually get more informative reviews than other sites, they just get more reviews, and you never see the weaker ones.

Amazon has millions of visitors and therefore a surplus of user-generated content. Since you are not Amazon, you should probably plan for fewer reviews, and even fewer review ratings.

It’s Not Just Amazon

Of course, the caveat about copying from other sites applies to everyone, not just Amazon. Consider Banana Republic, a leading global clothing brand with a robust e-commerce site. Because Gap Inc. owns Banana Republic, the site is actually combined with four other brands—all displayed as tabs across the top of the page.

This solution puts multiple labels together on a single site, while also keeping them distinct. But there is a major potential problem.

If I’m looking for sweaters on the Banana Republic site, I see that there are other brands available, but I only see the sweaters offered by Banana Republic, not those sold by Gap or Old Navy. Suppose I don’t like any of the Banana Republic sweaters (a good bet, for me)—do I know that I’m only looking at a third of the available options? It’s possible that the perfect sweater is hidden on the Gap tab, but I’m going to leave without ever seeing it.

The site designers are clearly aware of this issue, because subtle links to the other brands’ sweaters appear in the right margin. These links don’t show me what these other options look like, or even how many there are—and there’s an excellent chance that I’ll miss them entirely. But I suspect that won’t bother the designers at all.

If I’m on Banana Republic, I’m probably interested in a Banana Republic sweater, not a Gap sweater, and certainly not an Old Navy sweater. Without getting into psychology, these brands are household names and users are likely to enter the site with specific and persuasive feelings attached to each. As a shopper, I don’t mind the gentle reminder that others are available, but I’ll be annoyed if these irrelevant sweaters are mixed in with the ones I want.

Gap Inc. knows that users are informed and opinionated about its labels, so it pushes those brands first, before the actual products. (Users choose the brand they want, then the product; Gap Inc. also offers no help in choosing between the different labels.) Since your brand is probably less of a household name, you’ll want to ensure that your products come first.

Be Inspired, But Still Be Smart

There is a lot to admire on sites like Amazon, and looking at industry leaders is a great way to get inspiration for your own site. But differences in business models, audience, and content mean that a lot of what you see won’t work on your site. You are not Amazon—which is great, because you have a chance to be better. After all, Amazon didn’t make a profit until its seventh year in business, and that’s one model most people would rather avoid.

Usability experts have an annoying shared trait: they tend to answer a lot of questions by saying it depends. Each website’s unique content, audience, goals, and style ensure that there are no universal solutions to even the most basic questions. This means that there is only one way to know if your site really works for users: you have to test it. Fortunately, if conducted right, these tests shouldn’t require a lot of money or time.

When professionals begin designing a website, they typically follow a series of guidelines or design patterns that help ensure the result is easy to use. In the case of simple interactions, such as a log-in form, this method almost always results in a usable design.

However, when the interface becomes complicated or highly specific to an individual site, it’s unlikely that any existing guidelines or patterns will provide enough direction. At this point, the designer cannot—or, at least, should not—be sure that the interface will work: what they have produced is simply an educated guess at a usable design. Even worse, many inexperienced (and some experienced) designers will base their work on assumptions or personal preferences—either their own or their clients’. Now you can drop the educated and just call the design a guess.

Beyond the Guess

Most major websites rely on user testing to determine if their features work for visitors. Although the specifics vary with each implementation, user-testing basics are generally the same. A representative sample of subjects are exposed to a website (or a portion of a website), data is collected based on the subjects’ interactions, and the results are analyzed to measure effectiveness.

Big sites like Amazon and Netflix collect data from huge numbers of users in a constant stream of specialized tests. If Amazon wants to test a feature with 5,000 new users, they only need to turn the feature on for 45 seconds and 5,000 new users will see it. (Being an 800-pound gorilla has its benefits.) Of course, big websites tend to have big budgets, and this type of ongoing testing isn’t cheap.

But while these tests generally produce a lot of great data, more data doesn’t always mean better results. Just recently Google tested its new social media tool Buzz with 20,000 people. Unfortunately, these 20,000 people were all Google employees—who have a specific set of shared experiences and web-usage patterns, to put it mildly—and this testing therefore failed to turn up a major usability flaw: Buzz automatically connects you to people you have emailed. The resulting—and immediate—storm of complaints had Google publicly apologizing and rushing to make changes.

By any measure, Google’s user testing for Buzz was a massive failure. Think you could do better with five subjects and a couple days? You should.

Cheap, Fast and Good

The idea that user testing can be done on the cheap isn’t new. Jakob Nielsen’s 1989 paper on discount user testing is often seen as the start of the low-cost usability movement, which also gets called guerilla usability.

The basic premise is simple: although larger studies are useful, discount testing produces valuable results and a far greater return on investment. (Predictably, Nielsen goes further and suggests that discount testing often produces better results than bigger studies because it encourages an iterative design process.) In fact, one of Nielsen’s more interesting findings was that while better studies produce better results, even poorly executed quick tests provide significant value.

At Orbit, we’ve distilled a variety of research and approaches into three main principles for guerilla usability.

1. You don’t need to test more than 5 people at a time. If your site (or feature) has a major flaw, the first subject will find it. So will the second. So will the 35th. You don’t need to watch people make the same mistakes over and over, and while five people won’t find every tiny problem, they will provide you with a lot of information about your site’s strengths and weaknesses. (Even testing a single person can be useful, especially since the obvious stuff is often the easiest to miss.) Similarly, while it’s best to recruit subjects who are representative of your actual audience, testing with friends, family, or anyone within reach will also produce worthwhile results.
2. Test early and often. If you wait until your site is complete to test it, any changes that need to be made will be expensive, time consuming, and complicated. But if you first test the flow of your main features by presenting a subject with hand-drawn wireframes (known as paper prototyping), changes require only a good eraser—or at worst, a new sheet of paper. There is no substitute for testing a live site, but running the major functions through a quick battery of paper prototyping will catch the biggest flaws before you start the expensive development process.
3. Focus on specific flows. Testing every feature on a large-scale site, even with a single subject, can take hours or days. (And that’s time for which these people will need to be compensated, once you find volunteers willing to endure such punishment.) After you finish a few of these extensive tests, you’ll be left with a mountain of data to sift through, and a potentially imposing array of changes to be made. But every feature on your site is not equal in importance. Start with the crucial functions—on an e-commerce site, this would probably be the checkout process—and save the less important features for later. If you do need to test a number of features, break up the work into several tests and conduct each just before the design or development of that specific function.

If conducted intelligently, discount usability can provide crucial data to improve your site’s design and greatly improve its effectiveness. Paper prototyping can produce results in a few hours of work, and tests on a live site can be completed and analyzed within a couple days.

These quick guerilla techniques won’t guarantee that your site is perfect, but they will ensure you catch the biggest problems. And that’s perhaps the most important principle of all: doing something is much better than doing nothing. Every user test you perform—however modest—takes you further beyond the guess and closer to the knowledge that your site works.

This isn’t a joke. I was actually in this meeting. There were eight people from three companies in a conference room and another two more people from another company on speakerphone. My answer at the time was four years, based on that business and their industry. Since then I’ve thought more about the question and the factors that determine the answer.

What is the lifespan of a typical website?

My short answer is 2-5 years, but that’s a pretty big range. Most experts would just say “it depends.” But what does it depend on? Here we’ll look at the reasons why a site lives a long happy life, or if it gets old fast.

Website life expectancy factors

Here are the main factors that I’ll breakdown the factors into two groups: your business and the site itself.

Your Business

• Is your business changing fast? Any fundamental changes coming up?
• Do you run a lot of promotions or events?
• Are you in a creative or technical industry? Times change faster for some than others.
• Do your visitors have high expectations? Do you have to show (or teach) them a lot to get through to them?

Your Site

• Does the site look narrow on your screen?
• Is the design “trendy” or cutting edge?
• Do you rely heavily on search engine traffic?
• Is the site difficult or costly to update?

The more times you answered “yes” to these questions, the more likely the website life span is closer your website’s lifespan is to two years than five years.

Example One:

Classic design for a non-profit with a nice content management tool and a built-in blog. It’s a flexible site for a business that doesn’t change too rapidly, for visitors that who are mostly looking for information.

Lifespan: 5 years

Example Two:

Contemporary website for an interior design company. The site has a Content Management System but it’s not very flexible because the design is more about beauty and impression. Visitors have high expectations and want to be impressed.

Lifespan: 2.5 years

Live fast, redesign young.

If the nature of your business puts you on the shorter end of the scale, you may plan on a major redesign in shorter intervals: every 2 years or so. This cycle will guide design and content decisions. A site that is designed to live a shorter life may have more graphical content (charts, infographics, page-specific headers and animation) and more graphic navigation (buttons instead of text, links). In other words, design may be more about presentation power than flexibility and ease of updating.

Time to pull the plug

Of course, you can keep a website active long after it’s outlived it’s usefulness. But you risk becoming one of those people who say, “I have a site, but please don’t look at it.” You’ve met people like this. They’re so embarrassed that the look and content are so out of date, they truly don’t want anyone to see their website. At this stage, the website is actually hurting the business. Imagine having a marketing piece that you want to hide from the world!

How to extend your site’s lifespan

Now there are ways to take months or even a year off the look of your site*!

• “Page Injections” – New templates. Maybe you really just need a new landing page design or a better contact page with a form and a map. This targeted procedure can focus on trouble spots where the aging is worst.
• “Nip and Tuck” – Tighten up the design with a few style-sheet changes. Refining the type (snip, snip) and making a few tweaks to the color palette (snip, snip) can help bring things up to date.
• “Face Lift” – Home page redesign. This is a slightly more drastic procedure and can actually be a bit pricy.
• “Flash Lift” – If you have a Flash piece, consider a new animation. This is a surgery-free (no coding) option that can really change the look of your site.

*These techniques were not tested on animals.

Bottom Line

When you, your business or your visitors change, your website ages. It’s old as soon as it’s out of sync with your business and is not getting you those measurable results. Keep it as young and fresh as possible, but be ready to make the tough decision to redesign. And when you do, think ahead as far as possible.

In Google, the map is called the “One Box” and the links next to it are called the “10-Pack” and clearly, the links are different there than in the regular “organic” listings below. If traditional SEO (content and inbound links) helps you in the organic, what helps you in the One Box and 10-pack? Evidence suggests that creating/claiming your local listings is a good start.

So here are the basic steps to claiming, creating and managing your local listing. We’re also showing you 19 places where you can do this. Most are Internet Yellow Pages sites (IYPs) and others are local directories and the search engines themselves.

Help Yourself

You don’t need an expert to help you create and claim your listings. In fact, it’s best if you do this yourself.

Over the life of your business, you may update your site many times – at least every 3-5 years – and you may work with different companies on different generations of your website, but some things should always stay within your control. I’m not suggesting you shouldn’t get help from experts, but just as you should be in control of your domain name, you may also want control over your local listings.

Pick Your Battles…

There are so many IYPs and local directories to choose from! Here are a few ways to find the best ones for you:

• Where’s the Competition Listed?

  From Google Maps, find competitors, click “more info,” then click the “websites” tab. You may find other places to add your listing.

• Where are you located?

  Many IYPs are still based on the databases they use for their printed phone books, which means that not all of them are relevant in all places. If the company doesn’t have a phone book in your region (such as Dex), it may not be possible to manage your listing on their site.

19 IYPs and other places for local listings

• YellowPages.com
  Largest IYP, provides listings to AOL Yellow Pages, MSN Yellow Pages. Owned by AT&T.
• SuperPages.com
  Second largest IYP, provides listings to SwitchBoard.com and InfoSpace.com. Owned by Idearc Media, a Verizon spinoff.
• Google
• Bing
  Formerly MSN Yellow Pages.
• Yahoo! Yellow Pages
• InsiderPages
  Owned by CitySearch.com
• Localeze
  Provides listings to yellowpages.com, dexknows.com and yellowbook.com
• InfoUSA
  Provides listings to CitySearch.com and Yahoo.com
• CitySearch
  This is a good one but it’s “paid inclusion.”  They get listings from infoUSA and they share info with yellowpages.com, superpages.com, insiderpages.com and merchantcircle.com. Interested? Contact Brian Zweig
• LinkedIn
• Best of the Web – Local
  This is a new “paid-inclusion” directory but the “jumpstart” listing is free.
• Yelp
  The most important of all review sites
• JudysBook
  This local business review website provides ratings to Bing.com
• Spoke
  This is mostly a peer-to-peer networking site, but there are business listings that can be managed
• Jigsaw
  This site is really a tool to get contact information for people in businesses, but you can manage business listings
• MerchantCircle
  A listing on this site can include all kinds of things including galleries, a blog, a newsletter and a network of other businesses. (Citysearch profiles migrate automatically in several business categories)
• Manta
• Dexknows
• Dun and Bradstreet
  

Keep it organized

To create or claim listings at all these locations, you’ll need to create accounts in a lot of places. I recommend keeping a spreadsheet with all the login info for all of your IYP and directory listings.

Keep it consistent

It’s ideal to have all of your listings be the same, if not identical. This will help seach engines know that each listing is yours. Make sure the business name is exactly the same in each listing. For the address, they should all have the same info in each field.  Suppose your address is 123 Elm Street, Suite 4. Make sure that “Suite 4” is always in the “address two” field and that it doesn’t appear as “Unit 4” or “#4” in some IYPs but not others.

Select Categories Carefully

Many of these directories and IYPs will give you the opportunity to select categories for your business. Take your time doing this, making sure to choose all the most relevant categories. Be thorough.

A good way to start is to first search for businesses like yours in that IYP. See what categories appear first. This will help guide you toward the categories that bring the most traffic to your industry.

The best categories are those with names that include the words you’re targeting for search engines. For example, if your business is a car wash, categories that have the word “car” are generally better than those with “automotive.”

Also, it’s worthwhile to choose categories that aren’t already full of the competition’s listings. When a visitor browses through a directory, you want to be on page one, not page three. So look around to find categories that aren’t as crowded.

You may find that your company doesn’t fit easily into the categories provided (ours often doesn’t). This may be because they are using “Standard Industrial Classification” (SIC) codes. It looks like these classifications haven’t been updated in a long time…

Add Logos, Pictures, Videos, Certifications, etc.

Whenever possible, enhance the listing with as much information as you can. Many sites now let you add a lot of things to your listings. Our recommendation: add them all. Upload your logo, add descriptions, keywords, hours, payment methods, and anything else you can think of. More is better.

Remove Duplicates

This step may take awhile. If there are multiple listings within an IYP for your business, claim one and request that the other be removed. These requests sometimes take weeks to process. But it’s important. You don’t want to confuse search engines by having more than one listing in any of the IYPs.

Why can’t I do all this from one place?

Supposedly, this is now possible. It’s called the Universal Business Listing. The idea is that you manage your local listing here, and they send the info to databases all over the place. I counted 44 different partners, including some that don’t let you manage your listing directly, like Acxiom. The downside? It costs $30.

What’s next?

Setting up and managing your local listings isn’t a one-step process. It may take weeks to remove duplicates and get some reviews. In fact, having your biggest fans submit reviews for you will become a lifetime process that you always have in the back of your mind. You may even find creative ways to give people an incentive to give you nice (but honest) reviews.

BONUS:  Yellow Pages Trivia…

Back in the day, AT&T heavily marketed the term “Yellow Pages” and the walking fingers logo. But they never filed a trademark application, so it’s in the public domain. If you see this logo in marketing, keep in mind that anyone can use it so it doesn’t denote any kind of authority. There are lots of stories about people who paid a company to be listed in the “yellow pages” and later found out it was a small, insignificant directory or an outright scam.

But if you ever want to use that logo of the walking fingers in your marketing … well, go ahead!

A special thanks to Taylor Cimala and the team at Digital Third Coast for contributing to this article.

Questions?  Contact Orbit Media for more insight into local search marketing.

People visit websites for specific reasons, and while these reasons clearly vary from site to site, the fact that users want something specific doesn’t. So when I’m thinking about a new feature, I always start by trying to understand who the target audience is, why they would come to the page, and what they are trying to accomplish. Only after these questions are answered, and there may be more than one answer for each, can I move on to the details of how the intended audience will use the tool, and consequently, how I need to build it. Although our clients’ input is absolutely essential to this process—after all, I don’t know their business or their patrons—it’s not their needs that I focus on, it’s the needs of the end user.

Recently we built a product finder for a client to promote their featured merchandise. The finder would allow visitors to answer a few simple questions and then receive a list of products with instructions on how to use them together. When we started thinking from the visitor’s perspective, we realized that a long list of general, expensive products wouldn’t be helpful, even if they were the client’s newest and most marketable items, because it’s unlikely anyone would want to buy them all and it would be hard to sort through them.

Furthermore, we saw that visitors wouldn’t want to answer a lot of questions, but would need to easily change their answers and make their results accessible later. (One of the client’s competitors, a major international brand, had obviously not taken this approach: after a long and frustrating questionnaire, the competitor’s product finder always returned the same lengthy list of products they wanted to push, regardless of the answers. Disappointment guaranteed.) Working with the client, we focused on returning a short, targeted list of useful and varied products that could easily be emailed, printed, or changed with just a couple clicks.  Designing this feature from the user’s perspective required more effort, but the result is a better tool that increases the client’s measurable return from their site.

In design, the term usability describes this process of understanding how a visitor will interact with a website, and usability is at the heart of all quality web design and development. Competitors are literally a click away, so if your site’s hard to use, there’s little reason for visitors to stick around. Of course, if you’re really good at what you do, or really cheap, your visitors may be willing to put up with a difficult site. But just in case, I’d recommend concentrating on usability.

Usability is a complex field that encompasses research, design, development, testing, and analysis, and what works for one site may not work for another. However, it’s based on a simple and constant principle: start with the user. This concept doesn’t guarantee that you’ll always get the results you want, but it does ensure that you’ll be on the right track. And that’s why I don’t build sites for our clients.

I just got done reading through the AIGA “Why” booklet and I feel totally refreshed and inspired. Not a day goes by that I don’t think to myself, “This is a stressful job, but I’m so glad I’m a designer.”  It’s not that hard to articulate in simple terms…

Yes, I get to be creative. (A constant reminder from people on the outside.)
Yes, my mind is constantly stimulated and challenged.
Yes, if I REALLY wanted to, I could wear shiny pink pants, a big fuzzy white coat and straw hat to work and not get sent home for it.  *pause* Hopefully I haven’t offended anyone in the office.  LOL.

…but, the real reason I love being a designer is the fact that every day I progress.

Here at Orbit, our team generates value by constantly evaluating our successes and failures.   We progress by constantly learning, striving, improving, and making better decisions than our last.  We play a big role in connecting the history of design with the functional uses and needs of today. We practice usable/purposeful design as collaborators.  We tackle tough problems and activate pin-pointed solutions by connecting wide-spectrum viewpoints and approaches.   These things as a whole inspire us to honor a commitment to success.

That is why I design.

Get the AIGA PDF >

Turn on a TV and you’ll see: nearly every commercial features people. Pay attention the next time you’re driving around the city: most billboards and bus stops display engaging faces. Browse a grocery checkout aisle if you need more proof: People magazine and similar publications do nothing more than humanize the people behind the media.

There is just something about a human image that connects with us in a way nothing else can.

Your business is a group of people with personalities, and it is these personalities that help distinguish you from other companies. By using pictures of people, specifically pictures of you and your team, you make yourselves real to visitors.

Let’s look at 4 ways to make your website more personal by putting a face with your name: stock photography, pictures of you, video of you, and pictures of your business.

Stock Photography

The fastest, cheapest place to find pictures of people is a stock photography site. Here are a few options:

• Stock.xchng: Images are free, but it may not be easy to find what you’re looking for
• iStockphoto: Inexpensive photos (under $10) with a decent selection
• Getty Images: Images cost more (usually under $100 if you stick with royalty free), but for no charge, they’ll help you find the right photo

Services like these make it easy for you to add that human element to your site: an open face, a warm smile, engaging eyes. Now you’re connecting.

But even the nicest, most professional photo of a pleasant-looking model wearing a headset won’t show the uniqueness of your business. It won’t connect with your visitors as effectively as snapshots of real people at your company.

We encourage you to consider:

Pictures of You

It’s easier to trust something if you can see it. Seeing is believing.

Your site needs to convey that your business is credible, and authentic photos of your people will help establish that trust.

Ideally, you should have your pictures professionally shot. A pro will have the lighting, camera, and eye to make your photos shine.

The shoot will cost something, but the photos can be used in many materials, such as printed brochures, presentations, media placements (PR), business cards, and even on social networking sites like Facebook and LinkedIn.

Use your photos as a chance to show style and creativity. Here are two examples of people pictures with personality:

• Apply a Photoshop filter: For an example, look at LeadVantage Profiles
• Use illustrations: Check out the Orbit Team Section as an example

Video of You

Give the face of your company a video lift. Online video of your people and your business can have a dramatic impact on results.

Imagine yourself in action on your own website, discussing your professional passion and telling your story. What could be more compelling?

A half-day camera shoot of you in front of a green screen might not cost as much as you think. But even so, many business owners are uncomfortable with the idea of appearing as a talking head on their own website. That kind of hesitation can cost you money.

From a marketing perspective, a business owner is an invaluable spokesperson. Your body language, gestures, and tone of voice bring your business to life. The value of that impression far outweighs the cost or discomfort of creating your video clip.

I know of one company that takes this approach to the extreme with live, streaming video of team members working at their desks!

Pictures of Your Business

To make your connection with visitors as impactful as it can be, think about focusing on places as well as people.

If you have a store, show a picture of it. Or post images of your offices. Even a tightly cropped photo of your sign will make your business seem more real, more tangible.

This is where a company with a physical location can have an advantage over a web-based business.

Orbit’s site is a good example of this. To differentiate ourselves from the thousands of virtual businesses in our industry, we added an interactive feature to our site that shows off our space.

Bottom Line

Humanize your site. Use people pictures—stock photos if you have to, but whenever possible, opt for professional pictures of your actual team.

Add style with professional photography or illustration. Then, if your budget allows it, consider video and invite your visitors to look you straight in the eyes.

Okay try to ignore the sweet graphic above that is linked to a very cool “French Twig” doggie food bowl made especially for your loyal friend and rug warmer. Also, try to ignore that you want to buy lots of sweet modern products and doggie clothing for your oh-so-perfect puppy. Lets try to focus for one minute on the fact that miaandmaggie.com is a great modern designed website and e-commerce experience with interactive features. The product photography is great, the product pages are simple, to the point, have a great zoom feature that make these products easy to buy. What more could we want as customers, but a smooth process for buying online.

An added bonus to the convenience of buying online is the ability to give our opinion. We see this ability to comment or review products and blogs everywhere and most of us have used and appreciated this feature at least once, somewhere. We can all agree, its great to have that little bird in your ear telling you what happened when that other person bought it.

If you look just below the product on Mia and Maggie there is a quick tab view rating system that allows the user to interact with the company a little more. Even though this is a great way to get feedback as a business owner, this is also a fun way to let your return visitors and/or loyal customers give their honest opinions of your products. This, in turn, makes it easier to predict next season’s hot items and brings the consumer closer to the business model: high-quality products as well as high-quality customer service.

Another obvious place where this strategy has worked is Amazon.com. It’s a known fact that there will always be those two or three customers with the 1-star rating, who had a terrible time dealing with the shipping company or got the product and thought it totally sucked…but with many products ranging from 500+ reviews or more, Amazon is giving customers more than enough reasons to buy. What’s great about Amazon is the honesty you feel when reading other customer experiences. For myself, those few bad reviews that get through are what make me believe they are real people with real experiences…which makes it easier for me to dismiss the few bad reviews.

There are other sites that show customer reviews like AmericanApparel but almost all products get a 4+ star rating… this could be that they customize their inventory per review ranking to optimize sales and return visitors… but somehow it comes off as a little more phony at that point. ALTHOUGH, I’ve never received badly-made, low-quality clothing from American Apparel…I’ve always gotten incredibly wonderful feeling t-shirts that don’t get holes in them after a few wears or discoloration or wrong shipments or late shipments….so it might just be that they have a great customer following, a strategic business model, highly-trained professionals answering the phones, talented America-based sewing factories and shipping services that they really do deserve all the stars. If that’s the case (and now that I’ve thought about it, probably is the case), big time kudos to AA.

So overall, I see great potential for Mia and Maggie and their customers’ interact-ability with it’s company as well as it’s products…yet I wish, as consumers, we could read other people’s reviews. That is what will turn the undecided online shopper into the shopper that checks out~! Maybe that will be Phase 2 in this web project – they are a brand new site and a great looking, usable one at that. I look forward to seeing the progression.

That’s it, I’m out!

Times are changing fast. Have they ever changed faster?

Business models are shifting as investments and marketing dollars seek out sure bets. Returns on investment are carefully scrutinized. Marketing budgets must be justified by tracking results.

Here’s where the marketing money is going and why…

In the Beginning

To understand the value of the Internet, let’s begin by taking a look at how marketing has changed over the last few decades.

This will give us a reference point on the place of the Internet in advertising, which will in turn reveal the place of your website in your own marketing plan.

By understanding the trends that have led us to this point, we’ll be able to look forward – to understand where we’re going by glancing back.

In the beginning, marketers reached potential customers through traditional media channels: TV, radio, newspapers, magazines, and also billboards and direct mail.

So that advertisers could reach the masses, these mediums were geared toward large groups. Even TV and radio shows were designed to appeal to very general audiences. The science of targeting specific people was just getting started.

Eventually, cable TV appeared, and the diversity of channels and shows exploded (Home Improvement and Friends shared the small screen with shows like Twin Peaks and In Living Color). Magazine publishers created new titles, finding ways of targeting more specific demographics (e.g., Alpacas Magazine).

These changes helped media companies slice up markets into smaller groups, thereby allowing advertisers to target narrower, more niche markets.

But the options for media were still the same: TV or radio in 30-second spots; quarter-page, rectangular ads in print media; mass mailings; and outdoor signs.

Then, the web came along, and with it an additional, supplementary channel for generating awareness of business or brand.

In the beginning, most websites were built by individuals who knew enough about both design and programming to handle entire projects on their own. Everyone in web design was multitalented and self-taught.

Those who understood the medium were just beginning to teach others in schools and universities, setting up the first programs in interactive design. Those who were studying website design hadn’t graduated yet.

The technology was young, and as visionaries began to see the possibilities, the first web-based businesses were born. Investment in these companies soared; fortunes were made – and lost.

As realism set in, the markets corrected themselves. Web-based businesses were still businesses, after all, and the fundamental laws still applied.

But the promise of the web as a marketing tool continued to mature, and the skills of good web marketers continued to develop. Search optimization, pay-per-click advertising, and email marketing matured as valuable specialties.

With all its advantages, the web gradually became more important in the minds of business owners, moving to the center of all thinking around marketing.

Consider the difference between web and traditional marketing: With TV and radio advertising, you buy time. With print-media advertising, you buy space. But the web transcends these limitations.

The Benefits of the Web

A website visit is an experience. It is not bound by a linear progression of time, like a radio ad. It is not limited to a certain area, like a print ad on a page.

Its a non-linear, self-directed experience where almost anything is possible. People can dig deep and spend long periods of time researching your business and interacting with your brand.

Targeted Marketing

If you liked advertising to narrower market segments on cable TV, you’re bound to love the Internet.

Through this channel, you can target incredibly specific groups of people; in fact, the more obscure and specific your target market is, the easier it is to find them with search-engine marketing.

Targeting vegetarian Jewish moms? No problem. Your site will be one of the few on that topic, you’ll rank at the top, and they’ll find you because they’re out there and they’re probably looking for you already.

Online Video

Now that high-speed connections are so common, the web has emerged as the place for video content. Suddenly, regular television is becoming known as “appointment-based TV” because you have to watch at a certain time.

Online video is challenging traditional TV – and doing very well. In fact, we crossed a milestone in February 2008 when the web surpassed television and newspapers as the primary source of news for most Americans¹.

Direct Communication

The web is 2-way communication. Websites can listen to visitors when they submit forms, fill out surveys, become members, and give feedback.

People can actually complete a transaction online, becoming customers through ecommerce. And for immediate gratification, the web allows visitors to access online services and downloadable products.

Tracking

Another huge benefit of the web over other media is the tracking that’s possible. You can measure results in a myriad of intriguing, detailed ways.

With a newspaper ad, you’ll never know the time of day when people viewed it. With a TV ad, you’ll never know when people looked away. With a direct-mail campaign, you’ll never know what percentage of recipients opened the envelope. But with online marketing, you have access to all this information.

Because of all of this, the web has moved from just another place to market your company to the center of all marketing.

Today, traditional marketing is just as much about promoting a company’s website as promoting the actual company. Ads everywhere include web addresses, and websites these days are far more than ads.

Understanding that your website is the focus of your marketing (and, in some cases, your only marketing) will help you understand the importance of planning it carefully, understanding your goals, and setting your strategy accordingly.

Your website is the center of your marketing efforts. Give it the time, resources, and attention it deserves.

¹Harper, Jennifer. “Web surpasses TV, papers as top news source; Half of audience goes online.” The Washington Times. (February 28, 2008): A06.

This is the last in a 2-part series on website planning.

We are exploring an approach that begins with big-picture ideas and ends with design. If you missed it, you may want to read the first article before moving on.

What is on the pages?

We are getting closer to design, but we’re not quite there yet. First, you need to take a look at your sitemap and group together the pages that will likely share the same layout.

For example: the homepage might include a large splash image that distinguishes it from interior pages; feature project/product/property pages and standard interior pages may have similar but distinct layouts; case studies could be displayed in a special format.

Since every page type will have a different layout on the final site, each one will require a separate template. In this case, template = type of page.

A very simple site might have only 2 templates: homepage and interior page. A larger site might have 10 or more distinct page layouts.

Some examples:

• Home
• Typical interior
• Product category
• Product detail
• Shopping cart
• Checkout
• Company directory
• Employee bio
• Advanced search
• Search results
• Contact us

Templates need to be designed individually, so each one will go through its own little planning process. This is where wireframes come in.

But what, exactly, is a wireframe? It has a layout without a design. It has no images, color, or fonts. If it has text, it’s usually just place-holder text that reads like nonsense.

Think of it like this: a wireframe is to a website what a floor plan is to a house.

In planning this layout, it is important to consider all elements of your users’ experience – from the conceptual to the concrete.

Think about the width of the site. (Are the pages going to fit on the 8% of screens that are only 800 pixels wide?) Think about how much text will appear in each section. (Users typically read only 20% of the words on a page – and that percentage gets smaller as pages get longer.)

Next, think about everything that will appear on the page: navigation, images, text, a call to action, logo/branding, etc. How much real estate should each piece get? Which elements should be the most prominent or closest to the top? Plan accordingly.

Once you have thought all this through, you can begin to decide where everything will go. On paper or in Photoshop, sketch a basic layout: add boxes, placeholder text, or images for all the elements.

Strive for a layout that will communicate clearly and be easy for your visitors to use. This is a good opportunity to improve usability by testing paper prototypes.

Keep in mind that some sites will succeed only if they appeal to search-engine robots or support the site administrator. If this is the case with your project, keep search-engine friendliness (SEO) and ease of updates (content management) in mind as you develop your wireframes. For best results, ask an expert!

Once you have sketched basic layouts for each type of page – keeping visitors, functions, content, and other requirements in mind – you have got your wireframes.

Can you show me what it�s going to look like yet?!

Notice how late in the process we begin designing.

There are many ways to successfully apply a creative design to a wireframe. Of course, stakeholders’ personal preferences will be a factor. But as much as possible, try to guide the process by visitors’ needs and the style of the brand.

Make sure the elements on each page are given balanced prominence; this helps visitors understand your offerings at a glance. Create a clear and easy path for them to follow. In the end, the design should entice users to take action.

Technically, design comes after the planning process, but it is important to make sure these 2 stages connect well. With so much preparation, it seems like this phase should be easy and quick. But many projects actually slow down during design.

Why is that? Well, most websites are handled by teams, and there are typically many stakeholders. If new people get involved this late in the process (and they often do), they probably won’t understand all the factors that led to the design.

To make this step as smooth as possible, it is best to get decision makers involved from the beginning: every person who will help determine the final design should be part of the entire planning process.

Define decision makers early and bring them along at every step. Trust me. This could save you weeks of time and energy.

So there it is: one smart way to plan a site. I am sure there are others. Just as every website should be flexible, every process should be adaptable to the unique needs of the project.

The most important thing is to make sure you have a plan. Adding requirements late in the process can be expensive, time consuming, and frustrating.

Carpenters have a saying I often think of: Measure twice. Cut once!