Getting the Most from Your Developer

Here's the truth.

You business is built around online ordering. As it stands you site needs to make improvements to ensure you can survive the online competion. While you have survived and grown so far, all your marketing efforts will be fruitless if you cannot make your site a simple and easy to use.

The good news...

It can be saved!
I have been developing websites since 1997, and am a very usability conscious developer. Remember one thing, you site is not there to make you feel good about it, it is not even there to look nice or for others to praise on how good it looks. It is there to accomplish the goals of the customer.

So the first question you need to ask about your site is this:

1. "What are the customers specific goals coming into my website?".
It can be useful to think of different customers and formulate a question based on those specific customers. For example: "What are the needs of a young single woman. A single man shopping for a girlfriend?, a married mother?, a married man?, a separated man/woman?, just married man/woman?"
Answer these questions from there perspective and address there individual needs, and you will have a site that works well for your customers.

2."What are my expectations or goals of the website for my business?"
Very often the answers will be the same, but with a different twist. If you can answer these two questions, and focus your designs and development to solving and catering to the answers of those questions, then you have a site that works for your customers, AND your business.

Then you add value, by helping the customer make decisions, and streamlining tedious tasks, all the while entertaining them (here's where the flash effects, and niceties come in), and you have a GREAT site.

The basics ...

1. Ramp up your images and style guides to show what customer's are getting. You know your product, but everyone else is in the dark. When shopping in the store, customers pick it up, feel the weight, the texture, the sparkle, listen to it, smell it, taste it before they decide to buy it. The more you can mimic this experince the more successful your online store will be. So yes, there are a few senses that cannot be conveyed through that thin wire called the Internet, but how can you be creative in potraying that information?

2. Keep the images professional and relevant.
A gallery is a good idea, but don't post them if they look like a snapshot. Back shadows, blurry images, zoomed out to tiny, bad angles, grumpy models, cutoff parts, irrelavent backgrounds all distract from that quality you're are selling.

3. Remember the customer or web users goals.
Do not sacrifice flash features for functionality. I don't care if you site has flash, and how smoothly thing fade around if they are not giving me what I want. I would rather see more images in a full scrollable page, with description, and available styles beside them so I can easily choose what I am looking for.

Don't make users work by tediously scrolling back and forth through the 5 thumbnails, trying to see them all, and then trying to go back to find and compare images of the ones they liked.

4. Keep it simple.
Customers do not understand your internal divisions of services or products. All o often business divde thier websites into dividions based on thier company internal divisions which may be based on accounting or physical locations, or inventory. Customers should not need to figure out your system. Use a category and site structure that makes sense to them.