Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design That Hurt Ad Agency New Business

October 11, 2010

Usability is a critical success factor for websites. If yours isn’t easy to use it is a very poor reflection of your agency and prospects will simply leave it.

I’ve written this often, a good creative rational for your agency’s website is that it should become your agency’s online brochure. It is he place where your work resides along with your agency’s capabilities and credentials. It must be user-friendly.

Web design expert, Jakob Nielsen states that, ”Web design is not a matter of taste or aesthetics — it’s a matter of science … what we actually know from our studies is that the average user experience on the Web is that of failure.”

Nielsen practices what he preaches. His own Website registered some 5 million hits last year, and he estimates that some 200,000 visitors read his bi-monthly column on how to make Web sites more “usable” — that is, easy to navigate and clearly organized so that visitors can find the information they’re looking for.

Here are his top 10 mistakes in Web design:

  1. Bad Search. Search is the user’s lifeline when navigation fails. Overly literal search engines reduce usability in that they’re unable to handle typos, plurals, hyphens, and other variants of the query terms.
  2. PDF Files for Online Reading. Users hate coming across a PDF file while browsing. PDF is an undifferentiated blob of content that’s hard to navigate. Reserve it for printing, distributing big documents.
  3. Not Changing the Color of Visited Links. Knowing which pages they’ve already visited frees users from unintentionally revisiting the same pages over and over again.
  4. Non-Scannable Text. A wall of text is deadly for an interactive experience. Intimidating. Boring. Painful to read. Write for online, not print.
  5. Fixed Font Size. Respect the user’s preferences and let them resize text as needed. Read more about letting users control font size.
  6. Page Titles With Low Search Engine Visibility. Search is the most important way users discover websites. The humble page title is your main tool to attract new visitors from search listings and to help your existing users to locate the specific pages that they need.
  7. Anything That Looks Like an Advertisement. It is best to avoid any designs that look like advertisements. Selective attention is very powerful, and Web users have learned to stop paying attention to any ads that get in the way of their goal-driven navigation.
  8. Violating Design Conventions. If you deviate on your site what is commonly done on other sites, your site will be harder to use and users will leave. Jakob’s Law of the Web User Experience states that “users spend most of their time on other websites.” Consistency is one of the most powerful usability principles: when things always behave the same, users don’t have to worry about what will happen.
  9. Opening New Browser Windows. Designers open new browser windows on the theory that it keeps users on their site. But even disregarding the user-hostile message implied in taking over the user’s machine, the strategy is self-defeating since it disables the Back button which is the normal way users return to previous sites.
  10. Not Answering Users’ Questions. Users are highly goal-driven on the Web. The ultimate failure of a website is to fail to provide the information users are looking for.

Why do Web site designers neglect to ensure usability? 2 Primary reasons:

  • “First is that they just neglect the entire issue because they think their own Web site is easy to use because they designed it so they don’t understand the need for usability testing,” says Nielsen.
  • “The second reason is that even if they recognize the need for usability, they think ‘we’ve got to bring in a team of five Ph. Ds, build a special laboratory with one way mirrors and test fifty users’ — no you don’t.”

Nielsen also points out that there are 2 things that a site can do to improve usability:

  1. “You can run a very simple user test in three days… just get some real users in.”
  2. The second method is professional analysis, which requires an expert with many years of experience to assess a Web site’s design and structure.

Read the full version of Jacob Nielsen’s article, Top 10 Mistakes in Web Design. See also: Usability 101: Introduction to Usability

5 Comments | Agency Blogs, Best Practices, Digital | Tagged: , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass

Recycling Older Posts and Articles for Ad Agency New Business

July 27, 2010

Keeping older content alive can provide additional fuel your agency’s inbound lead generation program through social media. It also greatly enhances the return on your writing time investment.

Some of the most helpful tips on blog writing I have found online from resources as old as 1996. In a day when blog content that was published only a few months, it is often discounted as being old. If it is content that has been generated over six months it is considered ancient. But some of the most helpful resources that I have found for writing for Web is as old as 1996.

I often cite older sources without disclosing the date, if I’m confident the resource is of worth to my readers.  Readers would often discount these resources if I included the date when I cite the source.

Just one example is information that I gleaned from Jacob Nielsen when writing this post, “How do users read on the web? They don’t … they scan”. His online writings have completely changed my view of “older content”.  The New York Times calls Nielsen,”the guru of Web page usability”.

The date of the material shouldn’t matter. What should matter is relevancy. Is the content still of value to your audience?

Here’s an example of some of Nielsen’s rich nuggets of information for writing for the Web:

In research on how people read websites we found that 79 percent of our test users always scanned any new page they came across; only 16 percent read word-by-word. (Update: a newer study found that users read email newsletters even more abruptly than they read websites.

As a result, Web pages have to employ scannable text, using

  • highlighted keywords (hypertext links serve as one form of highlighting; typeface variations and color are others)
  • meaningful sub-headings (not “clever” ones)
  • bulleted lists
  • one idea per paragraph (users will skip over any additional ideas if they are not caught by the first few words in the paragraph)
  • the inverted pyramid style, starting with the conclusion
  • half the word count (or less) than conventional writing

Web users generally prefer writing that is concise, easy to scan, and objective (rather than promotional) in style.

Jacob Nielsen’s insights were ahead of the times. It would be a shame to discount them just because some of his great content were published online over fourteen years ago.

I continue to recycle and repurpose blog posts to over 40,000 + Twitter followers and too subscribers to the Fuel Lines eNewsletter. I have also pulled older content together for eBooklets, white-papers, SlideShare presentations. You can even recycle your blogs content into a book. Recycled posts continue to generate lots of blog traffic and fresh comments from readers who have just discovered them for the first time. By reviewing my analytics I can tell what posts to keep in this recycling rotation and what I need to pull out. Ultimately my readers decide what is appealing and what isn’t.

If you’ve written it, don’t assume that the majority of your readers have read it. Don’t be afraid to repurpose/recycle content.

Also, as you write your posts, learn to write “ever-green” to give the content a long shelf life. By doing this, a post that took me an hour to write, will provide a 100% return on my time investment.

I recently wrote a post, 50 of the Best Insights from Ad Age’s First Ever Small Agency Conference, the first ever small agency conference sponsored by Ad Age. Even though this was a one-day conference, I purposefully wrote the post in a way that would allow the content to be used for a much longer period of time.

I would also suggest revisiting older posts that may not have generated very much traffic. With the proper edits and revisions you can breath new life into them as well.

Here are some additional resources for creating content for an agency blog for new business:

 

3 Comments | Agency Blogs, New Business Tactics, Social Media, Time Management | Tagged: , , , , , , | Permalink
Posted by Michael Gass