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As I’ve said before, I hate complicated sites.  I love simple ones.  And to restate the premise, I like my 50mm f1.8 and I use Apple products. When it comes to the web, I want what I want, and I want it now. 

Many websites (typically ones that have been through a marketing department committee meeting) are just a mess of images and text. Trying to find what you’re after is hard going.  More like rush hour (why is it called rush?) traffic instead of a well marked road at 2 in the morning.

So you’ve only got a few seconds, how are you going to use them?  I would suggest not spending them by forcing your user to swim upstream against a flood of stupid content they’re not even there for in the first place.  Yes, I said stupid.  It is.  It makes me angry.  Just like the phrase “make the logo bigger“.  Stupid.  Stop it now.

Three points. As promised.

1. Single focus.  Keep pages about one thing, reduce choice and remove unnecessary elements.  This will also help your search engine rankings as you’ll have pages that are highly-relevant on a particular area.  Apple do a great job at this informationally and visually.  Sure, other information is there, but you’re never struggling to remember what you’re at the page for.  A good way to say this is, ‘the more elements there are on a page the less important each element becomes‘.  Your users attention is a limited resource.  Spend it wisely.  What would you prefer, 25 elements of almost no value or 2/3 or high value?
    
2. Be lazy.  Do you enjoy (or bother) clicking over three times on a site looking for something? Either will your customers. Same goes for the check out procedure.  Keep it as efficient as possible and respect your public’s time.  The effort you spend mapping out a user process will come back to you as people enjoy their interaction with your site and come back.
    
3. Use Nappy-San.  Clean up your design and don’t forget the power of white space to relax and serve information. Be really considered here.  Nothing I hate more than crowded pages where the slightest portion of ‘unused’ space is more evil than rain on your wedding.  I don’t care if it looks like you made it 100 years ago as long as I can figure it out, but don’t harass me!  So this ties into point one, don’t make your user fight through the jungle to find the juice.  It’s not a war.  You won’t win.

OK, nice and snappy.  I hope your a little more informed about how to keep fussy fans feeling fantastic.  They get what they want, and who’d have thought it, you will too.

Love to hear your thoughts, contact us if you want more information on how you can improve your site for you and your users.

~ Rob

Search Enginge Findability (SEF): How easily can people find you when they are searching for your service or product?

Brown Box helps businesses like Australian Opal Cutters increase their findability through search engine placement.

What terms to target?

One of the questions I have had to ask for Australian Opal Cutters, “what will people look for?” The obvious answer might be a simple description for the industry or product you offer. For their website it could easily be opal. But you could also describe with terms such as wholesale jewlery or opal cutters. Not so easy to pinpoint and how much competition will there be on a word like opal?

Diversify and get searches

The more the competition, the harder it might be to get into the top page of the search engine results pages (SERP). Take a look at the SERP opal for Google - it returns around 19.4Mill results. If I target something like Australian Opal, then with less competition (1.12Mill) it can be easier to return a higher search engine result. Our lesson here? Diversify your possible search terms.

Australian Opal Cutters was found in September through 558 different search terms; which shows us that people aren’t just going to look for opals or some other short variation of that term. I often wonder what people are thinking when they find the site with terms like:

• pendant sterling wholesale setting findings;
• australia opal code 1603 bracelet;
• huge black opal -ebay -e-bay;
• australian rainbow stone;
• claire sanders sydney; and
• j71628.

Some are obvious, but some like j71628 make no sense to me at all but with 558 different search terms that return Australian Opal Cutters the findability of the site is greatly increased.

Increase searches increase sales

Think of your site, how many search terms do people find you with? 5? 10? 20? Increase those and be found! The best way to do that is to provide lots of good content related to your business or related to the website. It will take time, but in the end it will translate into more traffic and the possibility of more sales. I am glad to see as a result of my work that in April there were only 273 search terms that resulted in a click through to Australian Opal Cutters, compare that with 558 in October and I think we can classify that as an increase in findability which has resulted in an increase in sales by 1800%. There’s always a lot more work to go, and search is not the only way to gain traffic. But it is a good start.