A Checklist For Business Websites - Part 2 - Actions
This is the second article in a three-part series about the essentials of business websites. Part 1 focused on the importance of demographics and defining your target market for your business website. In this article, Part 2, we're going to explore the different types of actions that should be associated with your site including automated actions, actions taken by your users, and your actions as a website owner. Part 3 focuses on the various metrics that a business site should be tracking and then what to do with the results.
If you haven't read the first article yet, I encourage you to read it first as this article will build on some of the principles established in the first.
Actions
The actions your users take on your site are ultimately what give your site value, both to your business and your users, and so it’s important to examine them with the proper amount of attention.
What Business Actions Do You Want Users To Take?
What business actions do you want your users to take? Example business actions could include making a purchase, filling out a contact form, subscribing to a mailing list or an RSS feed, or submitting and voting for your content on a social network.
Your website as a whole should have a main business action that you want users to take, called a primary call to action. Depending on the size of your website, you may also have one or more secondary calls to action. Calls to action need to be decided on the section and page levels as well. Your primary call on a shopping cart page will be different than one on your blog.
Each call to action should be visible above the page before it scrolls (which is called being “above the fold”) and unambiguous. Subtlety doesn’t apply – the more obvious, the better. There are limits, however. Take care of your users. Avoid anything blatantly annoying or harassing like blinking text, scrolling marquees, auto-playing anything with audio, and trapping your user on the page with pop-ups or similar methods.
"User studies have shown that users will not always take the best course of action or even one that makes the most sense; they will most often take the easiest route possible."
In general, make your primary call to action the easiest thing to do on the page. User studies have shown that users will not always take the best course of action or even one that makes the most sense; they will most often take the easiest route possible.
Secondary calls to action, if you have them, should be related to your primary call, but represent less of a commitment. They should be placed near the primary call to action on the page to draw attention to themselves and to indicate a relationship between the two. However, the primary call should be more prominent then the secondary call. Prominence can be indicated through size, color, placement, text, or any combination of design, layout, and copy that draws they eye toward it.
Constructing your calls to action is one place where your demographic research should pay dividends. Every aspect of your calls should be designed to appeal to your target market and should utilize the language or terminology they most often use.
What Actions Do Your Users Want To Take?
While making sure that your desired business actions are prominent and unambiguous, it’s important to consider what actions your users want to take. Why have they come to your site in the first place and how can they most easily find what they’re looking for?
Forcing your users to conform to your business demands without considering their needs is a good way to get them to leave and never return. Make it easy for your users to perform the actions they want to perform. By doing that, you remove any friction they might experience with your site and the resulting frustration. If their experience was a good one, they’ll be far more likely to return and to recommend you to others.
The most successfully converting websites will be those where the desired business actions and the users’ desired actions intersect, and that’s one of the reasons why it’s so important to understand your market. Being able to frame your business actions in a way that reflects the internal language of a user’s conscious or unconscious desires will make your website incredibly more effective in accomplishing its business goals. It gives your website automatic authority and your users will become loyal fans because they’ll feel like you actually understand their needs.
What Actions Are Your Users Unable To Perform?
Many websites simply don’t function properly and I would be remiss if I didn’t make this point. Problems can range from poor navigation and layout to malfunctioning forms to database errors. If your site doesn’t work smoothly, you’re damaging your brand and you could be compromising the security of your site and your users.
Monitor your site’s uptime. Check your site logs for missing pages. Test your site in different browsers and at different screen resolutions. Test your forms. Conduct usability tests in which you ask test users (even just friends and family) to find a certain piece of information on your site or to perform a specific action. Check for dead-end pages. If your users can’t do what they want to do, you’ve lost business and there might not be a way to regain that trust.
What Are Your Users Saying?
Trust is the new currency of the web. Being relevant and reaching out to your target market in their preferred medium isn’t enough if you aren’t also willing to listen.
At the bare minimum, your website should have a contact form, an email address, or a phone number. If you have a blog or other appropriate pages, you should also consider allowing comments. Disqus provides a comments widget that can be pasted into any page and most blog or content management systems allow for commenting. Feedback can also be gathered through polls or by services like UserVoice and Get Satisfaction.
You should also be monitoring your brand on the web. Twitter search is a great way to do that. Google Alerts is another excellent service that can send you an email whenever Google finds a certain keyword or phrase on the internet.
What Actions Are You Taking?
Staying on top of what is being said about your brand won’t make your business better in and of itself, you also need to respond to the feedback, whether it’s good or bad. Quickly responding well to a customer service problem can often make a more loyal customer out of a potential disaster. Thanking people for commenting, voting for your site on a social network, or making a purchase also goes a long way.
How Does Your Website Respond?
This topic is often cast in the light of managing public relations, but there is another aspect of it that frequently gets ignored. How does your website automatically respond to any actions taken by users? A few minor changes can dramatically improve the ease of use for your website and make it more profitable.
Here is a list of automatic actions to check:
- Are you validating your forms?
- Are your error messages on forms helpful?
- Does your website log and inform you of any errors?
- Does your website give feedback for a successfully completed user action?
- Do your checkout pages and thank you pages have upsells on them?
- When was the last time you reviewed the text/layout of an automatically sent email?
- Does your site properly remember user preferences through cookies?
- Does your site highlight search terms for users who are entering through a search engine?
More To Come
Again, if you haven't read the first article in this series about demographics for business websites, I strongly encourage you to take a look at it. Part 3 focuses on business metrics and how to apply them to your business website.
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