Website Design Effectiveness

Mori Technology Tracker has been tracking internet usage since 1997, current figures state that internet usage at home, anywhere else and broadband is up around 62% – 65%. This is due partly to the decrease in cost of technology and the rise in disposable income but also because as businesses have adopted the internet as a marketing tool, consumers also require the same technology to research products, find alternative brands and even purchase online without having to deal with a sales advisor.

To some extent the effectiveness of a website depends on the design. Chaffey, D suggests that website design is a result of function, content, form, organization and interaction. It’s a circular process that is based upon client profiling. As previously discussed data is collected and consumer profiles are made. Data is affected by web design and web design is affected by data. It is very rare that the first update of a website will be the last.

Websites evolve with consumer feedback so that the information can be easier to access, maintains retention so that the consumer doesn’t click out, enjoy a better web experience and eventually help them buy from the site.

A Forrester survey of 8600 US consumers showed that web users believe four main factors encourage them to return to a site:

1. High quality content
2. Ease of use
3. Quick to download
4. Updated Frequently

But a website is only useful if a consumer can find it. “Creating a website is not your ticket to success. You are competing against 50million other pages of content”. You have to make your website visible to search engines before they make it visible to consumers.

Search Engines are designed to trawl through the data written in websites and basically evaluate the websites in order of relevance, the most relevant being first, naturally. There are various SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) techniques that businesses can adopt to push their site up the ranks of Google and Yahoo alike, and there are many urban myths that put the whole concept of SEO in a large grey box.

However facts about SEO are that search engines rank websites in order of relevance. In order to make a website visible to the search engines they must be registered which can be done for free. The search engines then trawl through the data picking keywords that users are using to search and determine which sites are the most relevant.

This makes the concept of SEO hugely competitive for rival companies as they battle for pole position and some companies revert to some very dark techniques to aid their quest, but more often than not these result in sever consequences such as ‘sand boxing’ (Where a website is put in a virtual sand box and is unlikely to be crawled).

Inbound links, outbound links, and page rankings of all pages, including the links, HTML tags, keywords and PPC (Pay per Click) are all ways that web developers can help push the site up the ranks. There are many web design agencies that will take large fees for doing this work for a company but still won’t be able to 100% guarantee results. SEO is a long process that is very hit or miss but if you hit the rewards can be outstanding.