I have added a new article to the site today: Avoid “Me Too” Web Site Benchmarking. This was originally published in Association Trends and discusses how to conduct web site benchmarking that actually advances your organization toward your own goals, rather than implementing a mishmash of tactics without critical analysis.
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.
Here is an interesting job if you are up on your web 2.0 development skills and fancy an adventure in Fiji: Wanted: 2.0 web chief to manage and develop Tribewanted.com from Fiji. Looks like the company provides an ecotourism experience in Fiji and is trying to build a global community around itself. Interesting!
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.
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.)
This thoughtful post by Christopher Fahey is a great example of how information architects tend to miss the point of their projects: The Holy Grail of Information Architecture. If you read through this post you hear a lot about process and tools and what form the ultimate deliverable from the project should take in order to be most effective. Christopher has concluded that standard deliverables aren’t the Holy Grail of an IA project but he doesn’t quite make the leap to what is: achieving the objectives of the organization.
The point of information architecture should be to help the organization in question to better achieve its goals. The output of an IA engagement should be the achievement of those business goals, not necessarily a nifty flow chart and set of wireframes. Selling widgets, providing membership value, business networking, politics, whatever the purpose of the site: IA should help to achieve those ends more effectively and efficiently. If you can provide that value simply by reviewing and discussing a site in a meeting, great! Don’t get hung up on the deliverables. Do focus on the outcomes to which you are contributing.
Fred at Gulo Solutions points out that ASS&T’s registration form for the IA Summit implies that job prospects are not all that good for information architects. Two registration categories for the unemployed!
I would guess that is a holdover artifact from the dot-bomb. In any case, the categories should be adjusted in order to eliminate or de-emphasize the implied failure of IA as a career.
According to SitePoint, Microsoft Breaks HTML Email Rendering in Outlook 2007:
That’s right. Instead of taking advantage of Internet Explorer 7, Outlook 2007 uses the very limited support for HTML and CSS that is built into Word 2007 to display HTML email messages.
Egads! This will be quite a boon for newsletter designers, once they figure out what will work in Word 2007. It will be a horrible pain for the rest of the world. Given Word’s atrocious history of HTML mark-up, I shudder to think what hoops designers will have to employ to get decent rendering.
Perhaps my traditionalist preference for plaintext will come back into vogue.
(Spotted via Simon Willison.)
This looks like quite a handy plugin for Firefox: Firebug. It gives web developers all sorts of useful tools for reviewing and editing HTML, CSS and Javascript within a live page.
O’Reilly Media has published a new PDF book (their Short Cut series) that brings us up to speed on IE 7 CSS support and how it differs from IE 6. Looks like a good resource if you want to make sure your design translates well into IE 7. Releasing CSS:
In an industry that communicates with terms such as “Browser Hell” and “browser wars,” a web designer can be excused for having some anxiety over Microsofts recent upgrade of Internet Explorer 6 IE6 to Internet Explorer 7 IE7. Web designers should ask the following questions:
- What problems does IE6 possess and what fixes does IE7 provide?
- What part of the Cascading Style Sheets CSS specification does IE7 for Windows support?
- How can web designers work around any problems that exist within IE7s support for CSS?
- While web designers are testing their designs on the latest browser, how fast will IE7 be adopted by their clients audience?
This Short Cut attempts to answer these questions to allow web designers a smoother transition to IE7 and, hopefully, an escape from Browser Hell.
C. David Gammel, CAE 