Just a Click Away

Most corporate Web sites have undergone several redesigns—to showcase new products, to reflect rebranding initiatives, or to take advantage of new technologies. From a static homepage that reproduced the company’s marketing brochures, most have evolved into database-driven sites that are expected to produce significant revenue or leads.  And usability is a major factor that can’t be overlooked in these sophisticated Web site designs.

Usability is about understanding what your customers need from a Web site and providing it, according to Kraig Larson, founder and chief creative officer for Ciceron, a Web marketing and design firm in Minneapolis. That may seem obvious, but Larson says he sees a lot of unfocused Web sites that offer no sense of what message is most important. “We almost always need to be more simple,” he says. If customers can’t navigate past the homepage within four or five seconds, Larson says, they’ll go back to Google and look for another company offering similar services or products.

Allowing users to get to what they want within one or two clicks—and providing them with a clear sense of where they are on a site and where they’ve been—is a hallmark of user-friendliness. This can be accomplished by making navigation “persistent and consistent,” says Nathan Almquist, president and COO of Golden Valley Web-site design firm Designstein, Inc. “Persistent” means that navigation tools always appear, no matter how far    a customer drills down in a site. “Consistent” means that customers can find the navigation tools in the same place on each page. Consistent navigation is “like a bread-crumb trail that lets people figure out where they’re at,” says Kristina Halvorson, owner of Brain Traffic, a St. Paul company specializing in Web content.

Users also expect that Web sites will retain some information from visit to visit. “Nothing is more frustrating than for a person to go back to a site and have it not remember their name and other information,” says Dee Thibodeau, cofounder and co-CEO of Charter Solutions, Inc., in Plymouth. Whether you are a multimillion-dollar retailer or a small nonprofit, you can make your site more friendly by tying site services into your company’s databases or other systems—this is known as back-end integration. “That’s where the power of the Internet lives,” says Thibodeau.