The best design and navigation in the world is worthless if it requires a specific browser or application to run it, or if it generates errors at any point while visitors are on the site.

1.    Does any page on your site take more than four seconds to load?

Four seconds is a long time when you’re trying to just get to some information.  Imagine it taking four seconds for you to flip the page in a book.  Reading it wouldn’t be any fun.  Your website is no different.  Test it on fast and slow connections to see how everything loads.  Properly written code, limited scripting, proper use (not over use) of graphics and good hosting all contribute to the page load speed.  If any of your pages are taking this long to load then fix them.  People won’t complain about them, they will just leave and find somewhere else that has content that loads at a proper speed.

2.    Does your site force people do download plugins to work properly?

The only plugin that you should ever think about using on your website is Adobe Flash.  If users are required to download anything else then your site doesn’t work right.  People aren’t on your site to do anything but get information or buy things.  Stop making them do more work than is necessary to accomplish these tasks.

3.    Are you using Microsoft FrontPage or Word to create web pages?

If the answer to this is yes then you can skip the rest of this series and go to the part where we discuss complete redesigns and rebuilds.  FrontPage is fine for kids doing school projects.  It is not an acceptable tool to build professional websites.  FrontPage and Word violate a great number of standard web rules and put in absolutely huge amounts of code where none is needed.  This makes your pages extremely slow and frequently they don’t work on non IE browsers.  Again, if you are using FrontPage or Word then it’s time for a rebuild.  You will love some of the other tools that are out there and they’re no more difficult to use than what you are used to.

4.    Are you using any kind of content management system to manage your website?  If so, what?

Content management systems (CMS) are pieces of software that reside on the web server which help you manage the structure, navigation, design and content on your website.  If you are currently just uploading pages via FTP then odds are that you are not using a CMS.  You should be.  CMS have built in search engine friendly features and have the ability for you to drop in plug-ins and modules that extend and expand the function of your website with little or no coding.  They also allow full searches of your content by default and offer a host of features that make your content easy to manage and update.  The best part is that many of them are free (Joomla, Drupal, Wordpress, DotNetNuke).  The days of editing your web pages in DreamWeaver, FrontPage, or other HTML editors are over.  This is a subject that there are thousands of articles about, but in this case not using a CMS is not good.

5.    Did you know what your website looks like in browsers other than Internet Explorer?

Firefox, Opera, Chrome and Safari all have sizable market shares and all display content differently and you should absolutely test your site in all of them.  If you have not and don’t want to install a bunch of browsers on your computer just go to http://browsershots.org/ and type in your URL.  It will display the site for you and let you see how it looks in multiple browsers.  Do not, however, assume that your visitors are coming to your site only on Internet Explorer.  A sampling of browser statistics from November 2009 is:

(Data from http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp)

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Content & Updates

Good navigation is critical for three reasons.  First and foremost so your visitors can find what they want.  Second, so search engines can find and organize your information in their indexes.  Lastly so you know where to put new information easily and quickly.  The key to success with your navigation is your ability to categorize and organize your information into sections that make sense and then your ability to add both information and new categorizations over time with minimal effort on your part.

1.  Does your navigation scheme make sense to someone that knows nothing about your company or products?

If you are a paint company and your navigation scheme looks like a color wheel this might seem cute and fun, but is impractical and probably doesn’t make sense to many of your non-professional painters.  Try http://www.bow-wowbooks.com/.  While this site has any number of other issues, its complete lack of navigation makes it impossible for visitors to get to what they need.  This is the opposite of what you should be trying to do.  Your goal is to get people to the content they want as fast as possible.

2.  How many clicks does it take you to get from the homepage to critical information?

You may have heard of the “Three Click Rule” in which users should be able to retrieve their desired information within three clicks.  On small sites this may be true, but the underlying concept of taking time to consider critical paths is really what this is all about.  A well constructed navigation and well organized and commented content allows for this.  This also means that you should always be thinking about what “critical information” is to your visitors.  This information might change and if it does, you should be aware of this and adapt.  If you don’t know what visitors are looking for, or haven’t even tried to get to it yourself then it’s going to be hard to make these determinations.  Sit down at your own website and pretend to be a customer and find the information, or have someone that isn’t intimately familiar with your business do this and observe them.  If you, or they are getting frustrated or lost then so are your customers and guess what, they're going elsewhere.

3.  Do you have to manually update HTML or other code in order to add a menu item?

Having to manually update code to add pages or menu items is extremely error prone.  You don’t want visitors browsing to broken pages.  In addition to being error prone, having to manually update code to add pages is time consuming and unless your HTML is properly formatted, might also make your site very non-search engine friendly.

4.  Do you have any broken links, or Under Construction pages on your site?

Broken links are like having a door in a store that leads into a brick wall.  It doesn’t take walking face-first into one very many times before customers go elsewhere.   Having "Under Construction" is as bad, or worse.  If your content isn’t available, then it isn’t available. Either write the content and post it, or don't put up links until you do have the content.  Imagine going to CNN's website to look for an article only to find out that the only part that was written was the title and the rest of it is "coming soon."  You wouldn't go back.  Your visitors are no different.

5.  Did you perform any usability testing on your navigation scheme before launching your site?

This might sound daunting, but it isn’t.  Grab a couple friends, family members, co-workers and have them each attempt to do the same task.  Observe them and see how they accomplish it and then ask them to comment.  Such tasks might be “locate product X” or “submit a request for service Y” or “purchase twenty widgets.”  Ideally you do this before launching your site the first time, but if your site is already live then still have them do it.  After these tasks are done ask them not only how easy or difficult was it to do, but how they feel about it.  What you find might be eye-opening.  Not everyone looks for information the same way and people react differently  to any difficulties they have trying to do these tasks.  Your goal is to make your site easy to navigate and use for everyone, not just you.

1. Design
2. Navigation
3. Technical Attributes
4. Content & Updates
5. Tracking, Metrics, Feedback

Next:  Technical Attributes