Tagged with 'web design'

Duo uses a persona-based approach to website designs – which should help answer questions like, “Are potential clients or current clients the most common website visitor and your target for content?” Personas help designers and programmers visualize real people reading and acting on the content they find on a website. But after the design is done and the website is implemented, you have to know what your visitors are doing, how long they’re spending doing that, and whether your website is efficiently “converting” the behavior you want to see – buying a product, signing up for a class, or connecting with other like-minded individuals. So you constantly monitor your website to answer the questions related to your personas’ behaviors.

Visitorville is a visual website metrics tool that lets you go beyond just the numbers – “hits” don’t provide enough inforomation for you to know how your site is being used. But using a helicopter to circle your Very Important People around your website virtually, now that is above and beyond your usual website metrics tool.

Which pages are the most visited? Which personas visit those specific pages most often and how long does it take them to accomplish their goals? You can visualize people coming and going in buses, with traffic in buses and people that look like the Sims (in the 2D view) and they also offer a 3D view that looks like Second Life. The screen shots are really amazing and you can wow your friends and clients alike by showing them around your website in a way they’ve likely never envisioned it before.

I get a little bit creeped out sometimes by MyBlogLog displaying my profile picture while I’m viewing a blog. Every time I read a certain blog and it shows “user from Austin, TX” on a map or list of some sort, I wonder if anyone knows it’s me and if that matters.

Yet, despite my own trepidation and refusal to use such widgets on my site, I know bloggers who find it great fun and a motivator to keep writing. Using Feedjit as an embedded widget on your blog or website may help other website visitors as they browse, who knows?

What are your thoughts? Is it useful and motivating or simply too much information to have these visual methods for watching your web traffic?

According to this AmLaw Daily article, Still Loading: Law Firms lag behind the Rest of Corporate America on the Web, “there are still law firms of substantial size that have relatively poor Web site offerings, surprisingly poor Web sites.”

Yet as Sonny Cohen pointed out in his previous blog post, Award Winning Websites Announced By Web Marketing Association, legal websites that get their web design right are recognized and rewarded.

So what’s the real story here? Are law firms’ web designs lagging or worthy of lauding?

If you’re comparing American law firms to corporate America, apparently you’ll find lag in the area of website usability, interactivity, and innovation in design. But many law firms are going beyond “brochure-like” content towards client-centric and service-oriented site designs.

I appreciated Sonny Cohen’s comments on the AmLaw article, saying “the targeted personas for law firms are clients, prospects, potential lateral transfers and first year lawyers” and basically pointing out to other commenters that matching the needs of the users of the law firm’s website is more important than criticizing it based on their own personally-formed beliefs. Plus you need to tie the design into the firms business objectives – and being bookmarked isn’t a business objective. A persona-based approach to website design makes a lot of sense to me, and metrics for judging the effectiveness are a must.

The AmLaw article ends with a ranking list of the Top 100 AmLaw firms web sites. One note it does give you as a takeaway is that you can’t correlate web site design with revenue per partner. Yet without metrics there’s no way to prove this takeaway one way or another.

I found the AmLaw article informative but the comments were just as important – when analyzing effectiveness of a design or handing out rewards, make sure the criteria for judging the content and design matches that of the users of the site. Nicely done.

We are often asked two variations of the question, “How long is my website relevant.” Both have the same answer.

The first variant is, “Our site is x years old, is it time to redesign it?” The other variant is, “How long should we expect our new site to last.” The answer is “it depends.” But let me try to offer a better response.

First, we identify an economic life of a website. This is a balance sheet issue. Few actually record the website as an asset, but it is not unreasonable to assume it to be fully depreciated after 5 years. Some choose 3 years. Whatever you choose for business reasons does not necessarily translate to the useful life of the resource and it certainly doesn’t answer the question as to whether the site is still relevant or if the technology still works just fine. But it is the best way to establish a life of your site while also managing its replacement cost.

We believe the non-economic variables that determine the life of your old website or newly launched one are strategy, message, technology and look & feel.

Strategy is simply the manner in which you satisfy your business objectives online. The brief historic nickel tour of website strategy migration starts with a) establishing an online presence (the brochure-ware model) (1993 – 1999), b) becoming interactive (2000 – 2004), c) Web 2.0, social media and syndicated content (2005 – ?), d) semantic web (200X – ?).

Message is the way you tell your story. In its simplest form, the message is something as simple as “recently merged/acquired/out of business” which tends to shorten a website life considerably .  More commonly, the message is the outcome of an internal business review which re-prioritizes your services, service delivery and restates your unique value proposition. When the website is sufficiently out of line with the message, continual patching of the site may not produce a desirable outcome and re-imagining the site is called for.

Technology is merely an enabler of strategy. So technology is rarely the game ending culprit. Unlike our analog TV’s which the government is forcing us to abandon for new technology, websites built a decade ago will operate just as well (or poorly) as they did when launched. It’s when your strategy puts demands on your website technology that something’s got to give. Although it may look like the technology failed, in truth, look to your migrating strategy to determine the life of your technology.

And finally there’s the look and feel. Sometimes merely updating the accessories can do as much for a website as it does for the look of an old suit. While it is often the excuse for a new website, it is rarely the real driver.

After two days packed with great speakers on topics ranging from website design to online marketing ROI, Web Content 2008 ended on a high note with a cocktail reception in Duo Consulting’s office. The conference brought together marketing and technology professionals from a wide variety of industries, all hoping to find out how to create, organize, maintain and deliver web content in today’s Web 2.0 environment.

In true Web 2.0 fashion, conference goers were busy tweeting (#wc08) while listening to the speakers; photos taken at the conference were uploaded to Flickr; I also had the privilege of blogging at CMSWire on various sessions, including Duo CEO’s own Marketing in a Connected World and Content Management Meets Facebook (more below).

The questions asked at the end of each session and the conversations I was a part of are evidence of how relevant many of the speakers were. While Web 2.0 technology and social media may be part and parcel of the everyday life of those highly involved in technology, others in industries like health care or higher education often struggle with what to do about the new media landscape that they’re facing. Conferences like Web Content 2008 allow not only an exchange of ideas, but also an exchange of perspectives.

As a graduate student, it was enlightening for me to see how companies in the real world are trying to figure out how to manage their web content and what to make of the Web 2.0 “hype.” My takeaway from the conference: Web 2.0 isn’t for everybody. Web 2.0 technology merely provides tools, but companies need to first figure out what their strategy and business goals are before even thinking about “implementing Web 2.0.” That said, content and content management will inevitably play an increasingly important role in any company’s strategy (Web 3.0!). Effective content management is what will separate the successes from the failures.

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Some Web Content 2008 sessions:

Keynote: Hypersyndication and the Future of Media
Keynote: The Many-Armed Starfish: Today and Tomorrow in Social Media
Cross-Media 1:1 Marketing: Providing Personalized Content to Drive Sales
Design is Content, Too
Adding Dynamite to Dynamic Web Content
Don’t Let Web 2.0 Ruin Your Online Marketing