Ten Tips for Success Online

by contributing author Thomas Tate

Web consultant, Thomas Tate, spoke at the Brian Tracy seminar in Atlanta. Thom spoke about how you can make the web work for you or your business. And while there are more and more ways of utilizing the Internet everyday, Thom says he always tends to get the same questions from individuals and companies that are either just building their site or in the middle of a complete redesign. "What are your top ten tips for building an effective website?" So, to help you out, he has listed them below. They are not in any particular order, but these are the same tips that I gave in the seminar.

If you have any additional questions and would like to contact ICON for web consultation or a complete usability analysis, please e-mail thom.tate@bluedarter.net

Top 10 Tips for effective websites:

1) Make it Sticky – Stickiness is a measure of how users perceive your site and what draws them back to it. Web marketers often speak of the "3 C's" of Web sites -- commerce, content, and community. Commerce is the ability to take orders over the Internet. Content is the information available to visitors on the site. Community means the site provides a forum, chat group, bulletin board, or other mechanism for visitors to share thoughts, opinions, and information about the subject of the site. Community is an excellent way to increase your stickiness. If most visitors spend a bulk of their time viewing specific information, then you should provide MORE of that type of information.

In order to measure stickiness, you will have to have a program such as webtrends that measures your sites traffic and activity.

2) Make it Easy – A website should be structured in such a manner that visitors can find what they need and do what they want easily. Nothing is more annoying than going to a site and getting lost just trying something as simple as a phone number or address.

3) Make it Private 96% of people surveyed believe it is very important for websites to post privacy policies that detail what type of information is being collected and how it will be used.

4) Make it fast If your site takes more than 10 seconds to load, then your missing out on a vast majority of your potential audience. Keep the important points on top and provide navigation options on both the bottom and the top of each page. Provide a site map accessible via an easily found link.

5) Make it personal Amazon.com is a great example. (Welcome back Thomas!!) People tend to come back to sites that make them feel welcome and are personalized. You will have to have a program that enables "cookies" in order to make this work.

6) Make it work Make sure that your sites components actually work. Ever click on some neat feature only to have your browser crash? What are the odds that you go back to that site? Nuf said.

7) Make it strong Fulfillment needs to be up to par. 54% of companies surveyed have not tested fulfillment and only 10% of sites surveyed said that they would be capable of dealing with the surge overnight.

I ordered something off of a website on May 8th. As of August 22nd I still haven't received it and they just told me that it would be another month because of an overwhelming amount of orders. I don't think I'll be doing business with them again anytime soon.

8) Make it Professional A survey was sent to the top 125 Websites in retail, travel, content, financial services and consumer brand sectors and found that Customer Service fail rates are higher than last year. Only 50% of shopping sites and 40% of the travel sites responded within 24 hours. 46% of all web sites tested failed to respond within 5 days - if at all - or did not have contact details on their site for customer queries.

If your not getting back to your customers instantly, whether it is an auto response or an instant phone call, they are going somewhere else.

9) Make it Win-Win The ability to seek out and act upon the demands of the market is what makes one e-business different from another.

Call it: Customer Relationship management, value adding, or common sense, the ability to act fast on data gathered is what differentiates an e-business from a corporation that simply has a web site. Outpost.com does a good job of this. They suggest add-ons for customers when they check out. For example; if a customer buys a printer, Outpost may suggest an ink cartridge or some paper at a discount. This creates a win-win for both because the customer will have everything that they need when their printer arrives and Outpost has just increased its average sale.

10) Make it Interactive Tirerack.com allows you to choose the make of car that you have and then place the different tire and wheel combinations on the car to see what your car or truck will look like with that choice. They even allow you to change the color of the vehicle to more closely resemble yours.

Sites that are interactive attract more visitors and also increases your stickiness.