What follows is a brief overview of some useful guidelines to keep in mind when looking at building, updating and maintaining your website – or re-assessing the impact of your brand communication.
Most of what follows is largely the paraphrasing of tuition sessions from web experts Michelle McMahon (mimcmaho), Claire Bussey (Sticky Content) and Clemens Hackl (Clemens Hackl Design).
1) The building blocks
Your website can be divided up into 3 elements:
- Structure: the usability of your site, how it is pieced together
- Content: the images / words / videos that make up your site
- Style: how your site looks, it’s visual / design / aesthetic
2) Questions you need to ask of yourself before you even begin putting your website together
- What do you do?
- What’s your USP?
- Who’s your target audience? Who are you talking to? How do you talk to them? How should you be talking to them? How can you talk to them better?
- What do you want to achieve through your website? What are you selling? What information, engagement, awareness, and profile do you need to generate to better sell your product(s)?
- Why are people visiting your site – what do they want to achieve by being on your site?
- What would be a successful visit? From the point of view of both your users and you.
- How will they access your content?
- How IT literate are they?
3) How do website users think?
In order to create a good website it’s important to understand how web users think. Learn how they think and you’ll learn how to better communicate with them. This is what goes through a web users mind:
- Where is it?
- I can’t see it!
- I can’t find it!
- What do I do now?
- I don’t understand.
The user wants to put the minimum amount of effort into using your site – when navigating your site do not make them think. All information should be very easy to find and understand. Keep the need for ‘click’s to an absolute minimum. The main information on your site should be no more than 2 or 3 clicks away.
4) How do web users behave?
The people navigating your website are predominantly:
- Task focused: they’re on your site because they’re looking to do something or gain something. They haven’t got all day. They want to get the job done and move on.
- Impatient: 79% of users scan websites – they will not read every word! They’re looking for keywords leading them to the information they need.
- Suspicious: they’re judging you – trying to decide whether they should trust you and what you’re telling/selling them.
- Conservative: at first users are suspicious, then once they’ve found the sites they trust, then tend to remain conservative, stick to those sites and not look elsewhere – unless you give them reason to!
- Moving forward and constantly moving: don’t give your users any dead-ends. Keep showing them the path ahead.
- Wanting to control their own path: they’re not necessarily interested in using the site as you’re directing them – they will use it for their own needs.
- Not going to finish anything. They’ll glean what they need to and move on.
5) Write for your priority target audience
Only ever write your website with one target audience in mind. If you try to write for more than one you’ll end up writing for no one. Write with one, clear target audience in mind and all other audiences will understand where you’re coming from. Be clear and consistent with this tone of voice.
Your tone of voice must be consistent across all your communication platforms – your newsletters, blogs, social media and your website. And don’t forget that tone of voice is also important on your website error message pages and your newsletter sign-up, unsubscribe, and error pages.
Important: remember that the average reading age of a UK citizen is just 9. So make your site simple, clear and use plain English as much as you possibly can. Lose all the acronyms and clever terms you can. It’s also generally a good idea to keep your website conversational in tone.
6) A word about trust
It’s very, very important to gain users trust. No matter what you’re doing you need people’s trust. Use testimonials and quotes about you from well-known and well-respected individuals. Be consistent in your style, structure and content. Take care with the details. If a user seems mistakes, errors or out of context information they will think you do not care. No one wants to be involved with someone who does not care.
7) Call to action
Near the top of your homepage you need to have a clear call to action. You need to tell people who you are, what you do and then what you want them to do. Whether it’s sign up to your newsletter or apply for funding or start shopping – tell them what to do and where to go, and tell them clearly. This will focus the mind of the user and clearly let them know they are in the right place for what they want.
Throughout your site it is good to include calls to action – they focus the users mind and direct them through your site. Place calls to action at the end of sentences / paragraphs, as there they are more noticeable.
Remember: Your users can land anywhere along the user journey you’ve set out for them. They will not always start from your homepage and work through your site in the order you’ve set out for them. Users could land on any one of the pages along any user path you’ve created.
Always put links at the end of sentences/paragraphs. Use links to try to pre-empt what your user will want to do next: eg. if you’re talking about something not on your site, give users a link to it.
8) Scanning, lists & images
When deciding where to place your content it’s important you understand where users look for information. They scan for information, looking for keywords. They scan across the top of the site and down the left hand side, then from the top left of the screen to bottom right. Users scan the first few words in headlines, sentences and paragraphs.
With this in mind it’s good to keep text in short paragraphs and use lists wherever possible. Use of bold to mark important phrases is also useful. Together these elements make the information on your site far easier for users to search, digest and take action on.
In terms of usability text is far more important than images. Images are hugely important, and often far more efficient, in regards to the communication of your brand – especially in terms of achieving emotional-connectedness – but in terms of usability, text is what people are guided by.
9) Guidelines for structuring your copy:
- Every page needs a headline – drawing the users attention into what’s on the page. It’s a good, to where possible, including your organisation’s name in the headline.
- Sub-heading / stand-first: – this sits below the heading and gives a summary of what’s on the page
- Use bullets, bolds, lists and links wherever possible – the user scans for these.
- Put all the important information above the page fold – ie. In the part of the website visible on the screen before any scrolling needs to be done
A note on headings/sub-headings: these should be very noticeable, descriptive, front-loaded with the most relevant info/keywords and easy to understand. In your headline or sub-heading, where possible, use a question, incentive, threat or opportunity. This will engage the user.
‘Top tip’ lists are good. We like those!
Avoid italics and try to stick to lowercase – lots of uppercase can look aggressive.
10) Tips on how users read your copy:
Always write numbers as numerals, not words.
Users generally scan using the ‘rule of 2s’. They scan only the first:
- 2 words of a sentence – so front-load your sentences with the most important keywords/information the user is looking for
- 2 sentences of a paragraph
- 2 paragraphs of a page
11) SEO
To optimise your search engine rankings you need to be strategic and clear with the copy on your site. Ask yourself what are your keywords – ie. what are the words people would use to search for you and your website? (Google Insight is a good tool to help with this). Use these keywords across your website and ensure you are consistent in the words you use. Use them in and across the following:
- Domain Name (you can have two domain names and auto-forward one)
- Page Description (appears in browser window)
- Page Titles
- Headlines (try to use your organisation name as much as possible)
- Content
- Image meta tags (always label your images – to let search engines know what they are and thus what’s on your website)
The magic formula for SEO is to get other sites to link to yours! The more sites mention and link to yours, the easier it is for search engines to pick up on your site.
12) Be consistent
Not only across your website but across your entire brand – especially between your website and your business card. People look at your business card first, then your website – they must look similar in terms of feel, look, colours, design, font, style etc.
Consistency shows you are aware of what you’re doing and that you have thought it through, planned and know the reasons for your actions. These are all important traits to communicate.
13) Communication: Emails & Social Media
Your website is a platform to keep your community engaged on you – to keep you present – but don’t over do it. Keep ‘pleasantly present’ rather than consistently in people’s faces. Decide what other communication tools you will use – Twitter, WordPress, Tumblr, Facebook etc. Once you decide, invest time in creating, maintaining and developing relationships on those platforms. Remember, social media is a dialogue – it’s not a one-way broadcast of information from you to the world. Engage with your community. This takes a lot of care, attention and time.
Please note: the way users interact with each social media platform is often very different. For instance, the language, words and rate of use for Facebook and Twitter are vastly different. Bear this in mind when communicating via your social media platforms or you could end up alienating people you are trying to appeal to.
14) Basic Rules of Selling
Whatever you’re doing on your website you’re selling. You may not necessarily be requiring money from people but you are selling. You’re selling and communicating you and your brand. You want people to buy into you and what you/your organisation/business/company does.
Turn features into benefits. This means turning descriptions about elements of what you do into emotions, stories, and the practical impact this will have for your users.
How does what you do and what you’re saying benefit or mean to your user? A biscuit isn’t a brittle and round, it’s a lightweight, portable, cost-effective source of essential nutrients!
