FROM THE DESK OF STEPHEN BOLUS
the 3 elements of a successful website
July 22, 2020 | STEPHEN BOLUS
UX, UI, E-Comm, conversion rates, click funnels, influencers and drop-off rates. These are just some of the buzz words that you’ll confront when building a successful website for your company or organization. You will also find thousands of blog posts and cheesy social ads offering a “magical formula” for creating a website that will be guaranteed to make you the next hot trending business.
Let’s dig under all the tech terms and sales pitches for a minute, and consider three elements that ultimately determine the success of any site: visibility, usability and content.
You must address these three elements individually as well as in combination to design a winning site, and you of course want to do it in the most cost-effective way possible.
We can use an imaginary company to illustrate what we mean: think about a car seat cover company— let’s call it Car Seat Cover Emporium— that sells covers for all makes and models of cars. This company faces a competitive and diverse market with sellers offering products of varying quality. The selling points for Car Seat Cover Emporium’s products are great quality, super durability and ease of cleaning (remember these 3 points). How can Car Seat Cover Emporium tackle our 3-factor model to sell their product? Read on.
Visibility: How will people find you?
Everyone wants to be ranked number one on search engines— that’s the only sure-fire way to ensure high traffic and high sales volumes, right? Not really.
There are multiple ways that Car Seat Cover Emporium (or you) could achieve high visibility by: having SEO optimized pages, partnering with bloggers and affiliates to rate and test their products for a mention and link back to Car Seat Cover Emporium’s site and posting on social media outlets. Investing in a paid social media campaign could let Car Seat Cover Emporium target a specific demographic that would be more inclined to buy their products. Let’s remember those 3 selling points: Car Seat Cover Emporium can run a pay-per-click (PPC) campaign for “super-easy-to-clean car seat covers.” With a properly optimized campaign this would bring the most return on keyword investment.
Usability: How easy or hard is it for a customer to do what you want them to do on your site?
If a website is difficult to navigate, the busy consumer will quickly move on to the next site. Not keeping the user/customer in mind can be a costly mistake.
If a website is difficult to navigate, the busy consumer will quickly move on to the next site. Not keeping the user/customer in mind can be a costly mistake.
But how hard can it be to design a site for buying car seat covers? Well, let’s make a list of some requirements:
- A way to categorize the car seat covers by (but not limited to) make, model, year, color, material, driver side, passenger side, stock seats or after market, etc.
- A filter process so that a customer who only wants to see pleather seat covers in black for a 2016 Toyota Prius can do it within a minute without getting frustrated and giving up
- Be sure that if the buyer wants a driver-side seat cover there is an option to get a passenger and back seat cover as well within one click. This is vital or they will either a) forget about that seat or, b) lose interest in searching again.
- A shopping cart that is always visible, easily accessible and allows for a quick check out
- A checkout process that looks and feels secure and accepts multiple forms of payment
This is just a partial list.
Usability is like painting a room— 80% prep and 20% execution. Research is the prep, and there are a lot of questions that need to be answered, like who is the target user, what is the competition doing and what are some pain points that you will solve while your competition doesn’t?
Rather than investing the resources for research, Car Seat Cover Emporium could throw up an e-commerce site displaying all their products on one long page with a search bar tucked away, barely visible, in the corner. The customer looking for a black pleather seat cover for a 2016 Toyota Prius would have no idea where to go or what to do, causing them to leave and go to a competitor’s site.
Content: What creative elements do people see associated with your brand?
Content is what drives the engagement. Content is text, images, sounds, videos and animations. Content can take numerous different forms (for example this blog is content), and in combination with the right visibility strategy can drive customers to your site. Car Seat Cover Emporium could publish weekly blog posts focused on their products, like a post on “The 10 best seat covers for weekend adventurers.” Car Seat Cover Emporium might invest in a video showing how their covers are made, how durable they are and how easy they are to clean. The idea is to have quality content in the right places directing back to your site or keeping users on your site.
Visibility, usability, and content are the three fundamentals for success. Here at ChampCohen we have expertise in all three. Whether you need to rethink your site or create a campaign to bring in more traffic, we have you covered! No buzzwords or “magical formulas” just data-backed decisions.
References:
- Baymard Institute (blog) 41 Cart Abandonment Rate Statistics. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from https://baymard.com/lists/cart-abandonment-rate
- Invision App (blog) 13 impressive statistics on user experience. Retrieved July 20, 2020, from https://www.invisionapp.com/inside-design/statistics-on-user-experience/
