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e-Business: Site Design Tips from Innovators
Here are some lessons learned in the trenches of website redesign (thanks to veterans Ann Herrman Nedhi of HBDI, Dona Ortega of eFlowers and Joyce Wycoff of Thinksmart, Inc.):
- Look at sites you like. Make a wish list of all the features you'd like to include. Ann suggested doing as much divergent thinking as possible to consider all the possibilities, including what you don't know at the start.
- Make a list of your "Top 10 Dream Customers" and then talk to them in advance to work out firewall issues and configuration. As Ann said, "It's not good for business when your clients want to use your product (paid for by their companies), and the only solution is for them to do it from their home computer," because the company's firewall won't let them access your services. One of Dona's major partners was using a five-year-old browser, and the brand-new site didn't work on their browser.
- Ask lots of questions of your provider and keep asking "Why does it work this way?" Dona said, "Don't just nod your head and accept the jargon." Make sure you understand how it will work, especially what will be involved in updating it. Dona said on Mother's Day when they're sold out of roses at $99/dozen, she wants to be able to delete the offer herself and not wait for a webmaster. She also discovered that she wanted to be able to update her email newsletter list herself.
- Check out the site, as you're developing it, on older browsers (both Netscape and Internet Explorer) and slower modems, so you know how much of the real world will see it. This is particularly important if you are going global. Ann discovered the hard way that, in China, people were still using Netscape 3.0 and couldn't access her site.
- Joyce added, "Be cautious with 'frames,'" the design where the outside box or frame stays the same and the content inside changes when you click on the navigational buttons. When Joyce redesigned the Innovation Network site for the second time about three years ago, she learned that AOL's browsers did not support her beautiful, new frames-driven site. (That's a BIG problem since AOL is the biggest internet service provider). Although newer browsers do support frames, use of them is limiting for design .
- Spend some time figuring out what you want to measure in terms of customer interest in particular pages, responses to emails, etc., so it can be incorporated into the design.