Author Archives: David

Things to Think about Before a Web Site Redesign

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Mike is getting ready to refresh the design of his organization’s web site. He asks:

In my present job, I’ve inherited a website that is, to put it kindly, dated. It needs a top-to-bottom redesign and I’m finally getting that underway. The questions I’m struggling with — how do the members use the website, if at all? — what functionality do they want and need? — what really works for us?

These are important questions but I like to start at a bit of a higher level before delving into them. The process I use with my clients usually follows this pattern:

What are your overall goals as an organization?
What does your company or NPO hope to achieve in the next year? Two years? Five? You need to clearly understand what you are trying to achieve overall before you even think about your web site, even if it is a key element in achieving the goal!

How do you want to go about achieving those goals?
Otherwise known as: strategy. I picked up a definition of strategy from Alan Weiss, that goes something like this: strategy governs how you make everyday business decisions. It influences your tactics. It defines how you want to go about achieving your goals. Now you can get specific to the Web, placing various strategies into the context of how well they will serve your goals. You should also be looking at which audiences for your site are the most relevant to your goals and develop strategies for serving them.

How should your site specifically support those goals and your strategy for achieving them?
Now you get down to the details. What features and content best support your strategy? What imagery is best aligned with the above? How should it be organized to appeal to your target audiences? And so on.

Ideally, you should spend as much time and effort as needed to answer these questions before investing a penny in a redesign. Otherwise, you put your investment and overall success at unnecessary risk.

Notcasting: What Not to Do on Your Podcast

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Paul Bissex has posted a great list of things not to do on your podcast:

  • I Must Apologize for the Terrible Sound Quality of the Last Podcast
  • I Must Apologize for the Terrible Sound Quality of the Present Podcast
  • I Must Apologize for Not Making a Podcast in Several Days/Weeks/Months
  • Thank You for All Your Emails Telling Me What I’m Doing Wrong
  • I Need to Speak Very Quietly, My (Mom|Dad|Girlfriend|Ferret) is Sleeping
  • There Is a Very Exciting Thing Coming at the End of This Podcast But I Won’t Tell You What It Is
  • We Only Have One Microphone for the Three of Us
  • We Are Laughing About This Thing, Ha Ha, You Kind of Had to Be There
  • I Had Big Plans for This Episode But They Just Didn’t Work Out
  • Please Listen to My Next Podcast, It Will Be Better Than This One I Promise

No one cares about any of that! Just do your best and be interesting. This is important because it is functionally impossible to skim a podcast as you can with text.

New Web Site Design for High Context Consulting

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I launched a new design for my web site earlier this week. I wanted to freshen up the look and make some structural changes to the content and design. The cobbler finally has some new shoes of his own. 🙂

The design is fully standards compliant, thus practicing what I preach to my clients. The entire site is managed with WordPress, making use of it’s ability to publish standard pages as well as blog posts.

Many thanks to Steve Smith of Ordered List for his work on creating and deploying the design.

Ben and Richard on Prometheus

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Ben Martin has posted an interesting interview with Richard Lewis about the rebirth of the Prometheus retreat as a stand-alone, volunteer run effort. (Here is an earlier post I made about this issue.)

Nice illustration of how people can pursue the same mission as an association without actually doing so through the association. I think ASAE handled this in a productive fashion, so kudos to them! There are important strategic lessons in this chain of events for all membership organizations.

Page views are up 10%! So what?

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Metrics matter. People often say, “You get what you measure.” Metrics for metrics sake rarely actually contribute to the bottom line, however. When determining your web site metrics, it is better to focus on two or three that actually indicate value being created for the company than on a hundred that mean nothing.

Working really hard to improve the number of pages viewed on your site without understanding how each additional view creates value is asking for trouble. You may be increasing page views by such bogus methods as an automatic page refresh (as the Washington Post does with their home page) or by creating multiple clicks to complete a simple action, all of which frustrates your users. But your metrics look great!

Measure the creation and delivery of value. Ignore everything else.

Why Natural Search Engine Placement Is Risky as a Primary Strategy

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This Wall Street Journal article, How Search-Engine Rules Cause Sites to Go Missing, provides several examples of why relying on search engine driven traffic to your site as a primary strategy brings along some risks. Your business is subject to significant impact from relatively minor adjustments to the search engine algorithms and policies.

That said, the main example in the article is of a news web site that wants to change its domain name from a .net to a .com for branding reasons (after paying $1 million for the .com address):

Such a simple change, Mr. Skrenta has discovered, could have disastrous short-term results. About 50% of visits to his news site come through a search engine — and about 90% of the time, that is Google. Some companies say their sites have disappeared from top search results for weeks or months after making address switches, due to quirky rules Google and other search engines have adopted. So the same user who typed “Anna Nicole Smith news” into Google last week and saw Topix.net as a top result might not see it at all after the change to Topix.com.

Even if traffic to Topix, which gets about 10 million visitors a month, dropped just 10%, that would essentially be a 10% loss in ad revenue, Mr. Skrenta says. “Because of this little mechanical issue, it could be a catastrophe for us,” he says.

Since Google ascribes credibility to results on domains that it trusts, changing your domain name can have significant impact, as topix is discovering.

Any business model should be flexible enough to not be overly dependent on one source of business. For most organizations, search engine placement should be an important but not overarching strategy for the company.

Getting Out of the Way

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Bill Flagg, the blogging president of RegOnline, recently posted this report about improvements to their online registration process:

Last April we cut 2/3 of the fields from our RegOnline open account form and then saw our sign-up rate triple. The way we did that was by asking for all the billing information later in the process when they are ready to start taking real registrations. We expect to see our conversions from free to paid to go down some, but happy to say our net # of paid users is increasing dramatically.

Hope this helps.

Indeed it does! One of the entries in our book, We Have Always Done It That Way: 101 Things About Associations We Must Change, that I wrote was about just this. Get out of the way of your members/customers when they are ready to invest with you. Here is the full entry from the book, also available on the WHADITW blog:

Many associations collect demographic data from their members when they join or renew their membership. Sometimes this can be as simple as a few check boxes to more involved multi-page surveys. When dues invoices could only be sent via postal mail, it made sense to piggy back a data collection tool with it to save money on postage and take advantage of the member’s attention.

However, just because it works well in snail mail doesn’t mean you should do it online. For example, the cost-saving benefit goes away when you invoice for dues via e-mail or accept a new member via your web site. Another challenge is that conducting an online survey of a member before they can renew is much more invasive of an interruption than including a paper form in the mail. Making online payment challenging by requiring extraneous forms to be completed reduces the benefits of paying online to your members, which will raise your costs when they choose to go with traditional methods such as calling you or mailing in forms that need to be processed.

When a member has made the decision to invest more money in the association by purchasing a product or paying dues online, get out of their way and make it as easy as possible for them to complete the transaction.

Thanks to Bill for providing an excellent case that illustrates this point.

(Two notes: I tweaked Bill’s comment for typos and clarity without changing the meaning. Also, I have an account with RegOnline and used them last year for an event I conducted. Consider myself disclosed.)

Only at Freedom to Connect

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I was at the Freedom to Connect conference earlier this week at the AFI Theater in Silver Spring, MD. The conference covered internet and telecom policy issues for hard core tech/policy geeks and had a who’s who of wonks, scientists, lobbyists and gurus in attendance. Even a member of Congress.

The time was ripe for one of the most surreal DC moments of my life to happen at this meeting:

FCC Commissioner Jonathan Adelstein jamming on stage with Howard Levy, a world-renowned harmonica musician, while Scooter Libby’s conviction was reported in a chat channel projected 20 feet tall on the screen behind them. Woo!

I’ll post some of my notes and comments about the conference over the next couple of days.

The Value of Career Paths for Otherwise Dead-end Jobs

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Joel Spolsky just posted a nice essay on how his company provides insanely good customer service. I have been on the receiving end of that service (back when Joel was often doing it himself) and it is indeed great. Read the whole essay, good stuff: Seven steps to remarkable customer service.

However, the most radical idea in the whole piece is nestled in at the end of the article. Joel creates career paths for his customer support staff. How can a small company do this? The career path shoots beyond the company within a few years:

Many qualified people get bored with front line customer service, and I’m OK with that. To compensate for this, I don’t hire people into those positions without an explicit career path. Here at Fog Creek, customer support is just the first year of a three-year management training program that includes a master’s degree in technology management at Columbia University. This allows us to get ambitious, smart geeks on a terrific career path talking to customers and solving their problems. We end up paying quite a bit more than average for these positions (especially when you consider $25,000 a year in tuition), but we get far more value out of them, too.

They pay good money and put their customer support folks through college (!) while they work the phones and e-mail, wowing Fog Creek’s customers. And then they leave for greener pastures, but it is by design. Highly talented people have to compete for these typically undersirable jobs, just for the chance to learn from Joel and get a great education. Joel has created the purple cow of customer support jobs. Amazing. But there is no reason you can’t do the same.