A friend of mine sent me an email this morning asking me for resources on evaluating a website for a client. My reply ended up summarizing many things that I feel are important in a redesign, so I thought I would include them here for you to review. Then, at the bottom, I am starting a list of websites with resources for how to do various things such as site redesigns, web marketing, and building community on your websites. This list is by no means exhaustive, and I will be adding to it continually.
Here is my slightly edited response to my friends email:
…Feel free to ask questions like this about web design/strategy any time you like. This is what I do and I enjoy it. =^)
A couple of quick comments on the site before I give you some references:
1. Probably the two most important aspects of a site are:
a. Is it Easy to Navigate? - if people can’t get around a site easily, it is almost totally useless.
b. Is the content updated and Current? – if a sites content is old or outdated, people will usually never come more than once. That means it is a static billboard, which while useful, misses out on 95% of what you could accomplish with a website.
2. Here are a couple quick & easy recommendations for any site.
a. Make the logo and company name a hyperlink to the home page. That is fairly standard and is a bit confusing when people neglect to do so.
b. Make sure that everything makes sense. Are there random messages on the homepage that wouldn’t be clearly understandable by a person who knows nothing about your industry? If so, fix them.
3. From here you just have to determine what is the purpose of the site to determine how it can be improved?
a. Is it marketing? If so, your client could maybe make changes to their site, but the real changes would have to come in how they market it. There are lots of things they could do for web marketing, but they do not necessarily require a redesign of the site.
b. Do they just want the site to look better? They can definitely accomplish this, but it will be best to know in advance. A good site redesign can cost some money. Making the site more appealing is great, but it will not necessarily get them much more business.
c. Is it functionality? If they want added functionality it would be best to know what they want first. Perhaps they don’t know what they want and are just looking to you for recommendations. There is a lot you could add to the site. They could provide tools to their clients through the site, create tools for their staff inside the site, or create forums where customers interact that build communities around the site. Any one of these could be valuable, but they take some focus and need to be weighed against the needs of the organization in advance.
So to summarize, I think the best thing to do is have a detailed discussion with the company who owns the website (or with yourself if you are the one looking to change your site) about what they want to accomplish. What are their organizational goals – and what resources do they have to put into improving the site, and then look to see how the website can help them accomplish this.
My personal recommendation is to use your site to create community. Basically, find ways to get people interacting on the site about relevant issues to the company. This will take more than a site redesign, it will take an ongoing commitment and initiative to build, market, & nurture this community. By doing so though, they will become known more as the experts and the best resource for their specialty.
Now, with all this said, what are some resources… It depends a bit on what you want to do. Hmmmm.
The problem is there are literally hundreds of thousands of websites out there. Do you want to know more about web marketing? Do you want to know how to do a site redesign? Do you want to know how to build communities on your site?
I think the best thing to do is think about marketing. Go here http://notetaker.typepad.com/cgm/2007/02/my_top_t_en_art.html and read all ten articles that this guy recommends. This will give you a good idea of the best marketing direction they could probably take the site. I also am posting articles about web marketing every day here www.RubyMark.com . Make sure you are using Firefox though, because it doesn’t work in IE.
If you want to read about site redesigns only, try here. http://www.webmonkey.com/design/site_building/tutorials/tutorial4.html I haven’t actually read this, but WebMonkey is very respected and I have used many of their other tutorials to figure out how to do web design in the first place.
I will make three different lists of resources, site redesign, marketing, & adding functionality to your site. If you have a recommendation please send it to me.
Site Redesign List:
Marketing List:
Functionality List:
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