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Your Website—The Bottom Line

Updated Feb 2006
Eavesdrop on a business conversation about websites and this is what you’re likely to hear:

Person #1: “A company website is an indispensable tool.”

Person #2: “Oh yeah? I got one, and it hasn’t changed my business at all.”

Unfortunately, both speakers are right.

For a website to be an effective business tool, it has to do certain things well. The web’s been around for over 10 years now, and a fair bit of research has been done into what makes websites effective. According to a widely quoted Arthur Andersen study*, here are the things that make users want to go back to a website:

What Makes Users Return to Websites?

Factor	% of Users Who Find it Important
Ease of use/navigation	74%
Fast download time	65%
Regularly updated information	58%
Quality of content	57%
Organization of content	40%
Access to customer service	40%
Quantity of content	30%
Search tool on the site	25%
Homepage layout	20%
The Site is fun	19%
Look and feel of the site	18%
Inclusion of animated graphics	9%

*Survey conducted between March 30 and April 3, 2001. Results are based on responses from 990 online users.

Notice that the top nine items in the survey are not concerned with how a site looks. They’re concerned with how easy it is to use.

For the overwhelming majority of web users, the value they assign to a website has very little to do with whether the site is fun to visit, or has attractive pictures or animations. In deciding whether a site is worth using, most visitors assess one thing: whether or not they can find high quality information, and find it quickly.

Web usability expert Jakob Nielsen puts it even more bluntly: “On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website's information is hard to read or doesn't answer users' key questions, they leave.”
(Emphasis by Nielsen.)

Given this fact, we begin to understand why some businesses say that having a website hasn’t changed their business much. If the website was designed with the emphasis on pretty graphics and animations, but the information was poorly presented, annoyed users may be leaving in droves, never to return.

The second major factor in the success of a business website is the site's ability to rank well in searches for the relevant keywords or phrases. Studies show that about 8 out of 10 website visits occur because the visitor was entering keywords into a search engine and visiting sites that showed up in the search results.

It follows that websites that are optimized for their target keywords will receive web traffic, and those that do not, will not. There could be a terrific red widget supplier ten blocks from you, but if that company’s website is not optimized for the phrase "red widget", and that's the phrase you search on, then that site will be invisible to you on the web.

The moral of the story is this: if you’re going to have a website, get it optimized for maximum visibility. As with any service, you can pay a little or a lot for website optimization. Ranking #1 for very general searches like “accountant” will be near-impossible and VERY costly, but if you’re mostly interested in local business, or you have a product or service that fits into a niche market, then a basic optimization done by a qualified designer should give you a positive return on investment. The good news is that even if your site is already up and running, it can still be optimized.

To recap, there are two keys to having an effective business website: making it easy to use, and making it easy to find. A little attention paid to both will help to ensure that your website pays its own way.

(Original version reprinted from The Commerce News, March 2004)