Are you too emotionally involved with your own old website? The chances are, if you’ve had your website for a long time, that you’ve become blinded to its lack of usability – especially if it’s a website you’ve been expanding as you go.
Your website’s environment has been moulded around your needs, wants and whims and, even though you tell yourself it’s to help your visitors, its entire existence is centred around your idea of logic.
This type of thinking is all well and good if you’re running a personal website and you don’t care what other people see or don’t see. But if you’re trying to make money from your website, i.e. your website is your business, you could be scaring new customers away with your convoluted routes to sale.
Here are some top cringe-worthy phrases people use regarding their old website:
- I like it that way, it makes sense to me
- People are used to it, I can’t change it now
- I like designs that look like this
- It’s my favourite colour
And one of the things web designers most hate to hear, after tidying and re-designing a website to maximize sales, is ‘well I showed my wife/husband and some old users of the website and they say they like the old site as it is…’
Now, you may be thinking ‘of course web designers don’t like to hear clients don’t like their new design’, but that isn’t the problem. Can you see what’s wrong with the above picture? If you can, good for you – read no further! If the above all seems reasonable to you, read on…
Ask yourself, what is your website’s primary purpose?
- Is it to make more money?
- Is it to show off every aspect of your company?
- Is it let everyone know how great your business is?
If you want more paying customers and sales, the answer should be none of the above.
Shocking isn’t it?
Well, okay, so you do want to make more money – obviously – but that is an underlying purpose of your website, not its primary purpose.
Your website’s primary purpose should be to make it easy for other people to get what they want.
To be successful your website should not be for you. It should not be designed with you in mind. It should not be there to visually please you, your family and friends. The words ‘I’ and ‘me’ should have no place in deciding what’s best for your company’s website.
This may come as somewhat of a surprise for the emotionally attached, fuddy-duddy tinkerers amongst you, but your website is for your visitors. Your website is for people you haven’t met yet. Don’t think of your website as yours, it’s theirs – the unknown multitudes wanting to find what they need on your website.
People primarily want to know what you do/sell and where they can buy it, and secondarily where they can contact you. If they can’t see those things immediately, your website is failing.
You probably know your way around your website like the corridors and rooms of your big old dream house. However, for Joe/Jane public entering these hallowed halls for the first time, those winding staircases of obscure links and menus can be more like a nightmare. By all means let people find out more about you if they dig deaper, but don’t force them to read numerous paragraphs of text before they can buy anything.
If you have your site redesigned don’t ask your friends and family what they think of it; don’t get Dave, your oldest customer, to tell you how the old and new sites compare; and, worst of all, don’t leave it to yourself to decide – they’ll all give you inaccurate information because they’re all emotionally involved!
Big companies carry out market research on the streets, asking strangers, for a reason – they need honest results.
So please, ask people who’ve never seen your website before to take a look. Don’t tell them anything in advance, let them figure out what you do and see how long it takes them to find out how to get to what they want on your old site and your new site (ask your web designer to put your new site design on a temporary domain address) – even throw in a few other people’s sites in the same field for your testers to compare.
Don’t pollute your research by telling the testers what you think – a quality, functional website is not about ‘what you like’, it’s about ‘what they like’.
