Designing Your Website to Support Your Business

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Designing your website with your business goals in mind is a cardinal rule of e-commerce and an important catalyst for success, writes Charles Crouch.

So you have a website, but it isn’t helping your business very much. Having a website which actively supports your business objectives is more than a pretty design, flashing videos, and pictures of products.

A good website is designed to attract your target visitors, encouraging them to stay longer and interact more. It also discourages non-target visitors, those you do not want to serve for various reasons.

Here are eight different factors you must evaluate as you analyse your website’s business performance. They address the features and functions which establish the online interface your customers use to interact with you.

Look and Feel Sets Your Image
The look and feel of your website reinforces your company’s image and sets visitor expectations. Website designs range along a continuum from a functional layout providing information to sites which strive to create an experience.

Clear Navigation is Essential
Whatever look and feel you choose, your navigation scheme must be easy to understand, providing a clear trail for visitors throughout the site. Use standard conventions, such as underlining for hyperlinks, so visitors do not waste time, become frustrated, and leave.

Content Attracts Visitors
Content, the reason visitors come to a website, falls into three broad categories:
• Information: your own or aggregated from others
• Products: from a narrow range to multiple categories
• Services: provided offline or online

Online stores can use any or all of these in various combinations to construct a unique offering for their target markets. Good principles for content production and evaluation are:
• What does your target market want to know?
• Not: What do you want to tell them?
• How do you make it easy for them to find this information?

Customisation, Just for Me
Wherever they shop, people like customisation, offerings designed just for them. Websites are great at offering customised content, since the material shown can be adjusted on the fly. Website content can be customized in two ways:
• Personalisation where visitors indicate their own preferences
• Tailoring where the website adjusts its content based on what it knows about visitors and what actions they take.

Social Connections Count
Shopping has been a social activity for years, meeting friends and sharing the event. Online stores have difficulty replicating this shopping experience through the limitations of a computer screen. However, social media has given online retailers new tools to help visitors build their own networks of fellow shoppers and share their discoveries.

There is no single social network which will bring success. Just as people belong to separate groups for work, family, clubs, etc., there are online social sites which cater to different interests. You must select the best social media for your business and your particular audience, then incorporate them into your own website. You must make it easy for your visitors to share with others directly from your website. Having to go from your site to another just to share a link is a sure way to encourage visitors to leave and never return.

• to see and hear, with alternative methods
• to use, no matter what device is chosen
• to understand, with simple, clear text.

Many of these can be readily accomplished by using good design principles as you build your website.

In the end, making websites accessible and easy to use makes good business sense, because an inaccessible site means fewer visitors.

Good design from the beginning can
make websites more accessible to everyone.

Linking In and Out
Hyperlinks, clicking on a link and being taken to a different site, are one of the great features of the web. Links are a two-way street where outgoing links let you provide directions to valuable information for your visitors, while incoming links from other sites enable potential customers to find you.

You should have an active program to build incoming links from reputable websites which are related to your business, as well as providing outgoing links which customers can use to help them evaluate and decide.

Make Communication Easy
The Internet is a great communication tool where businesses can make it easy for visitors to communicate with them.

The internet offers many different channels for communicating with customers.

Communications can be responding where two-way conversations are held or non-responsive where information is sent to them only when they request it.

The variety of online communication tools has grown rapidly, there are plenty of choices for every business to communicate effectively with its customers.

Commerce that Just Works
If you are selling products or services on your website, you must be able to process financial transactions fast, easily and securely. Here is a list of basic e-commerce processes. These are minimums, you must do all of these well.
• Registration
• Order selection and configuration
• Shopping cart operation
• Delivery options, time and cost
• Payment approval
• Order tracking
• Returns

Many websites fail because they were designed without taking business needs into account. Every business and website is different, but they all must consider how these eight factors affect the interactions with their customers.

Article by Charles Crouch

Charles is a lecturer for the Boston University International Graduate Programs where he teaches a popular graduate course in e-business. He also gives classes in e-commerce strategy, as well as seminars and workshops on current e-business topics and presentation skills. Professionally he works directly with companies and organizations to improve their online performance through tailored projects and partner collaborations. Charles' background is in business operations, having worked for Apple, Inc. in California as a business manager on large facility management projects. He moved to London as a director for Johnson Controls managing business development and IT projects. Before relocating to Australia in 2010, he spent time in Belgium teaching and working with WSI, a worldwide network of Internet business consultants.

3 Comments

• • 
  • Dennis
  • 5th October

  Charles
  Funny – I would argue that what you have listed under ‘functional’ actually constitutes the experience…. That is; the aesthetic is just the appearance -but the experience comes from what you do under the hood – IMHO

  Reply
• • 
  • Shane
  • 5th October

  Thanks Charlie. You have provided an informative yet concise article that others less educated in these matters can use as a basic roadmap. I appreciate your time and efforts.

  Reply
• • 
  • Yong Yap
  • 6th October

  Hello Charlie,

  Finding logic and simplicity is one of the biggest challenges in business today, I come across this in my consultancy practice all the time.

  Obviously, for internet the same rules apply. Excellent summary I will try to apply this for my business too. We are currently working on the new website.

  All the best,

  Yong

  Reply