Is Your Web Site Hurting Your Business?

Dress for Success

Have you ever stopped to ask yourself this question: If I dressed like my Website, would I ever close a deal? Your appearance is your visual identity. Successful salespeople craft their clothing to optimize the sale. They understand that their visual identity affects how their message is received. The same rule applies to your website.

The company’s web design directly impacts the business. The website can be used as an effective marketing tool- getting your message across and persuading customers to take immediate action. A visitor’s impression of your site, their ease of navigation and ability to search for what they want effortlessly and efficiently inevitably translates to a set of impressions that shape how the rest of your business is perceived by the online world.

Ways Design Directly Impacts Your Business:

• Strong design excites and compels
• Generic design condemns you to anonymity
• Off-target design sends the wrong message
• Cheap design is a turnoff
• Bottom line: Design can make or break the sale

Bad Web Design is a World Wide Epidemic

Fortunately, this epidemic of cheap, off-target, generic web design does have an antidote. It’s called accountability. Apply it across your organization, and start treating design as a serious business component.

Your business strategy is only as strong as its execution. Give design a high priority and you will strengthen and realize that strategy. Your website exists to drive your target market toward a measurable action. Evaluate design by how well it educates, engages and motivates your customers. A website does not live in isolation, it must be integrated into the rest of your branding.

Is the Medium Maximizing the Company Message?

Take the time to investigate your web design firm. Many web development firms have followed assumptions and trends that do not serve their clients or their client’s customers. They gave way to artistic temptations and “cool” tools that sidetracked the company’s primary agenda. Educate your web professionals and keep them involved, so they thoroughly understand your brand and message. Effective professional design does not highlight the capabilities of the medium but uses the medium to highlight the clients’ capabilities. Design, animation, illustration, video and sound only have value when they translate into actualizing strategic business goals.

Hard Questions Need to be Asked:

• What is the value, or liability, of special effect-driven animated intros?
• Are you losing prospects during bandwidth delays?
• If the value proposition isn't articulated within two clicks, will the customer abandon interest? You bet they will!
• Did that video, for all the visitors that couldn't see it, enhance the message? Would choosing a strong illustration have instead been smarter alternative?
• Does the web experience make a statement on the credibility, usefulness and value of your of a product?
• Does a product interface make a statement on the credibility and value of your brand?
• Are your customers easily and efficiently finding what they came for?

Rx for Corporate Virtual Identities

How do we do it right? You begin by laying two critical foundations:

1. Your chosen web design firm must thoroughly understand the company’s products, the competitive landscape, the customer's psyche, the company's current position, the market the company wants to target and the key communication agendas. This knowledge forms a strategic plan that informs and guides all design decisions.
2. Your web design firm must know how to intelligently apply technology. They must comprehend the issues and techniques involved in making the medium perform for you: ergonomics, utility, timing, platform, browser and display variations, bandwidth cost and user tolerance so their creative capacity remains nimble and delivers on the strategic plan.

Measuring the Value of Your Website

The value of this creativity must always be measured against and adjusted to satisfy some basic criteria. During the design process, always ask and objectively answer the following questions:

• Is the site so visually powerful that it will rise above the mass of market noise?
• Does the site’s visual personality resonate with your target market?
• Do the visuals complement and reinforce the product's core messaging?
• Does every pixel lead the prospect one step closer to becoming (or remaining) a customer?
• Do you spare the user a thousand words where one picture would have sufficed?
• Have you made it easy to get the critical facts?
• Does the navigation separate your markets and lead them to more refined, targeted messages?
• If the customer only makes it to the home page, will they know what you offer?
• Are they enticed to stay, to make one more click and learn more about what you have to offer?
• Will the prospective customer grasp what makes you competitive?
• Keep your eye on the bottom line. Does the website incite the customer to take action — make a phone call, volunteer demographic and contact information, forward a URL, set a bookmark?

These questions and processes outline the first steps toward evolving web design integration with quality dimensions of integrity, rigor and maturity. If you can’t answer “yes” to all of these questions, you need to rethink your site before the launch. Web designers are not decorators; they are a key part of the business team. When everybody owns this truth, companies will increase their visibility and profitability

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Jeanne-Elise M. Heydecker is founder of JHeydecker Design Systems (http://www.jheydecker.com/), an Internet company that specializes in designing, developing and executing web-based and traditional sales, marketing, and management solutions. Ms. Heydecker brings over 20 years of experience in traditional and internet marketing programs for the business-to-business and consumer markets. She can be reached at: jheydecker@jheydecker.com.