Good and Bad Websites

There is no single mantra to achieve success in this world, in any domain or any aspect of life. One has to listen to their heart, their brain and learn from their experiences. 

Try Try Try till you succeed. This is the only mantra to achieve anything on this earth and that anything includes optimizing your website and bringing more revenue from your website.

So, let's start from the smallest things making our foundation strong. Here are few basic steps to be followed to make you website openable, readable and revisitable.

• Keep your website slim and fit - No one wants to wait more than 5 seconds for the page to load. Survey says that at 8th second your visitor is already frustrated and at 10th second you have lost him. Keep the website as lite as possible and especially the home page. You cannot change the internet speed of your visitor or you cannot expect a mobile user to download a 4MB webpage, so better change the content and keep it lighter. Next time you decide to put a 5MB sized hippo's picture on your home page, remember you are literally trampling your website under the same hippo.

• De-clutter your page -  A website with 100's of links all over the page will only make your visitor pull his hair. Imagine a well organized website, with all products grouped under their respective sections, a left Navbar to show the flow of current section, a top Nav bar listing all the sections on the website and small images of few key products or a particular section being promoted weekly or bi-weekly on the home page. Isn't that Wow!! Neat & Clean ! 

These are the India and US websites of citibank. Which one do you think is less cluttered? I am sure the traffic on that Thankyou card is much much more than the Indian Oil  Platinum card.

 

• Remove Flash - Flash is gone Baby, for Heaven's sake forget Flash !!! You don't want a high net worth individual opening your website on a high-end device to see a message "Flash not supported" instead of your fancy Image. 

 

Here is the home page of india-forums.com and you can see the message right in your face "India Forums Homepage Banner requires Adobe Flash". Home page banners are the first thing that catch visitor's attention, this is where you get the most conversions from and alas! all we get to see is a sad error message. 

• Do not deviate from the context - If i put up a dancing monkey on right side of this web analytics blog, then there will be no difference left between that dancing monkey and me !! Never ever forget the answer to "why does this website exist?" Here is a fantastic example of a good promotion and a bad promotion on the same website. 

• Bad Part - Our very own favorite irctc wesbite, popularly know for its snail pace speed has come up with a huge list of an "on-hover" shopping list drop-down and a shopping banner on homepage. Wow. Imagine the frustration of a person unable to login or book a ticket online due to its poor speed, is shown the list of items available to shop whenever he moves his cursor !!!  The important section of  alerts and updates has been given half the space of what the shopping banner gets. Ask yourselves, is irctc a shopping website of a train ticket booking website? 

• Good Part - The credit doesn't go to irctc, but to tata-docomo, who has encashed the opportunity of promoting his product keeping in mind the snail pace speed of irctc website.  I love the way tata-docomo marketing team promoted its product of high speed internet on irctc. 

 

• Keep your 3rd party servers far away - If your website is connecting to a 3rd party server for some campaign or for analytics or any other purpose, try to keep that part of the code towards the end. You don't want your webpage not to load completely just because one of the 3rd party servers you are trying to connect to is not responding.

• Add Name and meta-tags to your webpage - You don't always want to pay and get visitors to your website. Name and tag your pages properly and get free organic traffic to your website. Read What is organic data? to understand more about organic traffic.

• Tag all your pages - Its up to you, either spend a lot of money and buy a hi-fi web analytics tool like omniture or webtrends or just register for google analytics free of cost. But in both cases main point to remember is to tag every page on your website. Unless you tag your pages, you will not record the traffic, you will not understand what's happening on your website and you will never be able to satisfy your visitor/customer.

 

• Test & Test & Test - Are you happy with all the traffic that comes to your website or do you want more? If you want more then keep testing. Make changes to the website as frequently as possible but one at a time. Track every change and see which change brought you visitors & conversions more than the one currently put up on your website. Put the winner on, but don't be happy with the few extra customers which are coming, test again with something new. You never know the next test recipe might bring even more visitors than the last winner. Be Greedy and Be Ready to Experiment. Test and Target of Adobe helps in A/B and Multivariate testing. In some of the coming posts we will see what these two testing methods are.

•  Conduct Survey - An easier way to understand your visitor is to conduct a survey, ask your visitor his likes and dislikes. A survey generally tends to bring out the negative points about the website more than the positive. Well, that's the irony of life, whenever we have a bad experience we tend to write a compliant for sure, but when we like something we hardly care to compliment ! But its fine. Testing based on a survey result can lead to great results.

•  Be the customer - An analyst, who puts himself in the shoes of a customer or a prospect can bring revolutionary changes to the business. Though this is easier said than done, as the analyst has little authority to make changes, and its not easy for big bosses of the company to "be the customer". Well, an analyst should never give up hope and never stop raising their points. You never know which day your boss might actually give you a chance to change the world.