A lot of the questions I get from people new to online business revolve around the differences between online and offline, brick and mortar business. This makes sense as we’re all familiar with offline business, at least from a consumer point of view and most of us have worked retail jobs through high school and college.

The main difference between brick and mortar business and the internet is expectations and interactions.

We all know great service when we see it offline: the friendly greeter, the helpful sales associate, the discerning cashier and the customer service department that really represents the customer (instead of the accounting department). Determining great service online gets a bit harder as we don’t know what to expect. Common questions include:

• How do I find…?
• What is the policy around…?
• Where do I get help for…?

Usability addresses these questions. Good design and use of conventions gives the power to the viewer to get answers to their questions and instill them with confidence. Of course, looking for the answers is still up to the viewer. Websites don’t have a mechanism to see the frustration on a viewers face or read their body language and rush to the rescue.

…at least not yet.

Consider that if offline business is a system of great people, online business is a great system backed by people. In either case the people make the difference.

As clever website designers and marketers innovate the online experience will resemble the offline one more and more… but it will always be different. And it will never reach everyone. Sometimes the whole point of going out is to have human contact, even if it is just with a friendly waiter.

Posted in Business Owners, Useability, Web Design

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Jim Cook at Design Refugee has assembled 50 Common Web Design Mistakes. Jim has been teaching web design for years and has an all-star line up of clients including the Catholic Church, Country singer Vince Gill, the St. Louis Sports Commission, the Ronald McDonald House and the NCAA.

My favorite points include:

1. Untitled documents
4. Duplicate meta information on all pages
8. “Under Construction” pages
9. Frames
11. Worthless content
16. “Alien” pages
23. Restyling text instead of using heading tags
25. Using images for text
33. “Ransom” note styling
36. Resizing images in the browser
39. Gratuitous Flash
46. Reliance on email links
48. Auto-play sounds

Jim’s original article explains all of these issues and they are all things I regularly encounter online and explain to my clients. If you are building a website, this is a great checklist of things to avoid.

And if you want to know more about Jim Cook, check out his interview.

Posted in Website Designers, Useability, SEO, Web Design

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My wife had several women to the house the other night. Like any smart man I got the hell out of there. I went to the local Barns & Noble.

I looked through the magazines first. One that caught my eye was a 2006 wrap-up of advertising campaigns. I looked through the whole thing, inspecting and absorbing what everyone else is doing. I even took notes.

Then I lost myself among the books for a while. I noticed the barrage of colors and styles. My advertising receptors were at full power. And I paid attention to which books jumped out at me.

Next, I found myself in the business section. I found a great book by Tom Peters on design. What impressed me about the book is that it is about the importance of design. Design, argues Tom, is something everyone does (even if they don’t realize it) and is ultimately the defining factor in purchasing decisions.

Then I found myself in the Web Design section. I was looking at the new titles and noticed a lot of web design books are now about style and tricks.

By style I mean how-to-CSS books mostly but some reviews of what has been done and the aesthetic production of websites. I think just surfing around accomplishes the same thing… but is much less expensive.

By tricks I mean the latest Ruby on Rails, AJAX, Web2.0, delicious mash-ups and similar technologies. This is exciting stuff but I think every bit of code you can find in a book is also available online (free) and probably a bit cliché by now. How many new uses for tag clouds are there?

Then I found Krug’s Don’t Make Me Think!, which is a wonderful book on website usability. Krug talks extensively about the difference in what designers expect versus the reality of what viewers do. And then he points out some common usability errors. Again, most of this info is floating around online but having it all in one place created a few *Ah-Ha* moments for me. One particular moment came from a quote of Krug’s wife where she says that if something is hard to use, she’ll just use it less.

Krug also talked about people having only so much patience and once you’ve burned through it they are gone… with a negative image of your brand. I experienced this today with my new cell phone company. I got transferred so many times and asked the same information over and over again that I just got frustrated. I mean really, did I have to let them know I want English 4 times on the same call? Their operators were aware of the issue and kept apologizing in advance… If you know about the problem - fix it!

My cell phone company has an error in their customer communications. I ran out of patience and told them to cancel the service and that I’d be returning the phone. My view of that company is not favorable. It wasn’t any one thing that drove me to that point… it was a build-up of several small problems. When I caught myself saying “I don’t understand” for the tenth time (not exaggerating) I gave up. Their system is not designed well.

Back to Barns & Noble the other night. I realized something very important: people don’t buy products or services. They buy an expectation of an experience.

I’ve circled around this idea many times over the years but looking at thousands of books it really hit home for me. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, just a book that was written for me. Whose personality would be like mine. Whose writing style I could digest easily. Whose cover was flashy but professional. That would look good in my collection. That would be within a price range and deliver a certain value - sure! - but it had to fit my style.

So the question I have for you is how much value do you place on that element that defines your market? That thing that shows off your personality and style? How much do you value design?

Bonus follow-up question: Does your current design reflect your values or your customers values? (Guess which one will make you more money?)

I’ve been involved in design for over half my life now. I always knew on an instinctual level that it was important but even I underestimated how powerful design is… and how far-reaching it can be.

Design is how you communicate from the clothes you wear to the colors on your website. Design is how you communicate with everyone in your life from loved ones to employees to customers. A tank is designed to get a very different response than a bouquet of flowers. Your business image is crafted the same way and with the same results.

Posted in Graphic Design, Useability, Marketing, Web Design

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A regular question that comes up in forums is what is the best site structure for SEO?

People that have been watching this site from the beginning will remember that the navigation used to link to every page in the site on every page (on the right and in the footer). At first the site was only 3 pages so it wasn’t a problem. But when 14thC grew to about 20 pages I got some complaints.

The navigation was getting cumbersome and distracting. It was also becoming a pain to manage. Thinking of new ways to display a lot of links across multiple categories and make them look good and be usable was getting difficult. The site was suffering in the name of SEO.

When I launched the SEO Interviews I also did a full site redesign. I knew the first round of interviews was going to be around 10. Trying to fit that into the existing structure just wasn’t going to happen. This was also the time I was going to officially add services and transition from an “informational” site to a “sales” site.

The solution I came up with is basically what’s in place now. I broke the site into sections: Core, Blog, Articles, Interviews and Press. The “core” pages are the foundation of the site including the home page, services, about, contact and site map. I added a landing page for each section. Finally, within each section I included only the navigation for that section along the left (though the core pages use the same sub-nav as the Articles).

This seemed like a logical transition to me to make the site more usable. I was surprised to find out this technique has a name: siloing.

Graywolf talked about siloing on his blog and listed some additional advantages beyond just usability including the ability to direct the viewer’s attention where you want (like at affiliate ads). His most recent post on this topic is here.
Another surprise to me was a strong SEO advantage for siloing. Siloing concentrates sections of your site to particular themes which can help you pick up more search referrals. Remember yesterday when I mentioned there was an additional factor at work with my increase in search traffic? This is it.

The search engines see clear breaks in content through the structure making sections of your site more “authoritative” on certain topics. You can concentrate your internal navigational links and their anchor text to the keywords and elements that are most important to you.

With the new site update I am going to further restrict the navigation. With 26 articles things are getting out of hand again. I haven’t quite decided what approach I am going to use yet but be sure I’ll be watching the results closely.

If you have a small, new site and you want to make sure every page gets indexed use your navigation to link to every page in the site. When you grow out of that and it just gets too cumbersome or if you want to emphasize certain sections of your site or guide viewers to specific pages try siloing — it worked for me!

Posted in Useability, SEO, Web Design

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I think saying “disabled” creates the wrong image. When talking about people with disabilities when it come to the internet I’m usually referring to people who’s vision isn’t as sharp as a young, healthy, 20/20 person. Not-as-abled users include:

• Visually disabled people that see very little (shapes, shadows) to nothing at all (completely blind)
• Color deficient users
• Really near-sighted people that usually includes people over 50 years of age
• Dyslexics

What these people have in common is they have a difficult time interpreting web sites. Often they use audio browsers to hear what a web page has on it instead of seeing it.

How important are they… really?

From Accessites.org:

As many as 1 in 10 people in the UK are dyslexic. Given that the current population of the UK is around 60.2 million according to National Statistics Online. This suggests that the number of dyslexics in the UK is likely to be in the region of 6 million.

The number of visually impaired people in the UK in April, 2005 was estimated at 1.7 million according to the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals.

And this whitepaper (warning: PDF) offers 6 reasons supporting people with disabilities is a good idea (emphasis added by me):

1. Disabilities affect many more people than you may think. Worldwide, 750 million people have a disability and three out of every 10 families are touched by a disability. In the United States, one in five people have some kind of disability and one in 10 has a severe disability. That’s approximately 54 million Americans. In 2001, 180 million people worldwide were blind or visually impaired, including 7.7 million people in the United States. This is a substantial consumer segment that should not be ignored.
2. It’s good business. According to the President’s Committee on Employment of People with Disabilities, the discretionary income of people with disabilities is $175 billion!
3. The number of people with disabilities – and income to spend – is likely to increase. The likelihood of having a disability increases with age, and the overall population is aging.
4. The Web plays an important role and has significant benefits for people with disabilities. Of the 54 million Americans with a disability, 4 in 10 are online. These users spend more time logged on and surfing the Internet than nondisabled users. On average, they spend 20 hours per week online. In addition, they report more positive feelings about their interactions. Our participants told us over and over how the Internet has opened up a whole new world for them and has given them a sense of independence and freedom. For example, P7 is able to read the newspaper herself for the first time. P5, who was unemployed at the time, spends more than 12 hours a day online, listening to the radio, “reading” Web sites, and chatting. According to the Harris Poll, 48 percent of respondents with disabilities reported that the quality of their lives had been significantly improved by the Internet compared to 27 percent of respondents without a disability.
5. Improving accessibility improves usability for all users. As you’ll see in the findings and guidelines in this paper, making Web sites work for people who use screen readers takes little extra effort while bringing great benefits for everyone.
6. It’s morally the right thing to do.

Even if you don’t care about the moral implications, doing “good business” probably caught your attention! From my point of view - which is making sure all my clients are successful - improving accessibility for the disabled not-as-abled makes the sites work better for everyone.

There are some conflicting reports as to what really works and what doesn’t. The whitepaper above demonstrates that just adhering to the guidelines does not make a web site usable even if it is “accessible”. And this site about dyslexia also shows some conflicting reports about designing for the visually impaired and dyslexics that need to be sorted out.

It’s best to do your homework before building your site or hire a professional and let them worry about it!

Posted in Useability, Web Design

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