Sage Blog

Alexa: who is visiting your website?

At the moment I’m working on a major project to totally redesign and rebuild our website. This means that I’m spending a lot of time thinking about what makes a great website, and more importantly what makes one that’s not so good. 

There are millions of words written on this subject, so much so that it can seem pretty daunting. But the simple truth is that the essence of a great website is one that has your customer at the centre of it.

This may sound like a marketing platitude, but it’s true. Customer-centric design is the only way to produce sites that do what you need to do. It doesn’t matter if your site is all about sales or brochureware or about providing a service – by putting the customer at the centre of designing, building and filling your site with content, you’re building a site that your customers will want to visit and recommend.

How do you create a customer-centred website?

Because it can be relatively quick to build a website, all too often proper  research isn’t carried out. It’s easy to start thinking about what your pages will look like before you think about what your customers want the site to do.

Who’s your audience?

Stating the obvious perhaps, but the most important thing is to always know your audience, whether they are current customers or prospective customers.

I’m not going to cover off in detail how you can profile your customers, but there are great online tools like HitWise, which requires a subscription – it’ll allow you to look at demographic and profiling information about people who visit your site, your competitors’ sites, or even your industry as a whole.

How people engage with your current site?

If you’re redeveloping an existing site, you must first get a picture of how successful your current site is. What’s not working, and more importantly, what is.

Using web analytics you can get a detailed picture of your site usage. Free tools like Google Analytics can now offer in depth and customisable reports, but also have loads of easy-to-use reports straight out of the box.

What you need to look out for:

• Who is visiting your site?
• What they’re looking at?
• How long they’re spending on your site?
• Where are they dropping out?
• Which journeys are  leading to conversions?
• Which pages are generating complaints?

How usable is your site

Web usability may seem like a difficult concept, but it’s incredibly simple – it’s working out how easy it is for your visitors to complete tasks on your site.

A whole industry has been built on usability research and consultation, and there are loads of experts out there who can review your site.

Whilst spending money on a usability study may not seem as sexy as spending money on page design or fancy apps, it’s money well spent. By eliminating usability issues upfront you will maximise your site conversions and lessen the number of people who leave your site without completing their task.

If you can’t afford to complete a formal usability study there are loads of resources like this great usability guide that will give you hints and tips on how you can go about running DIY tests. But remember that you should be testing with your actual customers and markets in mind. Think about their needs, abilities, likes and dislikes.

Usability doesn’t end with a one-off study. Throughout the life of your website, you should constantly ask how your customers would engage with your site.

What do your customers want to do on your site?

So far we’re focussed on getting a view of the here and now, but it’s also important to think about what your customers may want to do on your site that you’re currently not offering them. You could find this out in a few different ways:

Competitor analysis – What services do the websites of your direct and indirect competitors offering? How do they deliver them? What’s good and bad about them? How do they compare with your site?

Customer research – there’s nothing better than asking your customers who they are, what their wants and needs are, what they think about your site and what they might want from it in the future. There’s a range of ways you could do this from simple, free online surveys like 4Qsurvey through to in depth face-to-face interviews with current and potential website users. For the best results, a mix of quantitative and qualitative with give you a well rounded picture.

Building website personas

Once you know who your audience is and what their wants and needs are you can build a set of personas that will help define the site’s structure, look and feel and website content.

Much has been written about personas, but again, the concept is really straightforward. Personas are fictional characters that bring together the key things that you’ve learned about your current and prospective customers. What are their wants and needs, what do they need to get out of your website? What is their motivation for visiting? What are their likes, dislikes and frustrations?

You would normally create a handful of personas – between 4 and 6. Even if your customer base is incredible broad, you must keep the numbers of personas to low, so that they are practical. I’ve found a great free online guide to creating personas, but there’s lots of other stuff out there. 

Once you’ve defined your personas, you can then use them as a means to empathise with your customers when making decisions on your website. For example, if you’re creating a new design for your homepage, think about how each of your personas would feel about the proposed design – how does it help them achieve what they need to achieve?

Rinse and repeat

It’s become a bit of a cliché to say that the world of digital is constantly changing, but it’s true. Think about the sites you’re using today – were you using them two years ago? If so, did they look and feel the same? Chances are that they’ll have changed significantly.

It’s not enough to only think about your customers at the point when you build a new website. In order to ensure that your site is customer focussed today, tomorrow and next year, you must continue to review your web metrics, talk to your customers and evolve your personas. It can be time consuming and it’s not always easy, but in doing this, you will create a site that your customers want to come to and will recommend to others.

Ewan McIntyre, Web Implementation Manager