Customer focussed websites

Want to know the secret of great websites? These sites are focused on how their customers find information. Sounds simple, but it rarely it unless intuitive usability principles are added. Check out these websites are my favorite example of great customer focus and design:

1. Web 2.0: iGoogle 

• customization, personalization, choice of many web parts, searchable, scannable web parts that can be displayed on my custom view, RSS options
  
• My iGoogle homepage contains many daily organization and inspirational web parts:
  

• to-do lists
• shopping lists
  
• sticky notes
  
• daily announcements/updates from my kids' schools
• motivational quotes

2. Commercial site: Kohler Bath and Kitchen

 

• excellent example of picklist guided navigation using Flash
• excellent use of search and access technologies
• excellent ways to navigate to get to desired information
  
• customer focused design, interest, movement
• best of smart web design driven by business objectives and satisfying customer needs

3. Non-Profit/Governmental Site: Centers for disease control and prevention (www.cdc.gov)

• best practice usability research went into site design
  
• smart indexing
• best of federated site search
• full level navigation by topic, audience, corporate

Finding and accessing website content

There are three fundamental ways that people find information and reports on a website:

1. By Navigation, i.e. a website's information architecture
2. By search
3. By an A-Z index

The secret is to ensure each one is properly configured and optimized.

One of the best search panels I have ever seen was used by the Centre of Disease Control (CDC) in the US.  I had the privilege of creating a search panel for another client pictured here and used some of the basis of the CDC's usability research into search best practices to create it:

Writing for the Web and Search Engines

It's simple really. If you've written well for the web, you've written well for search engines. That's because spiders crawl like people prefer to read on the web: titles, subheadings, highlighted words, bullets, hyperlinked text and use of short paragraphs with the most important information at the top of the page. All of these are listed in order of priority. For titles and subheadings, use plain language phrases that your users will Google and you'll start coming out on the top searches.

Who's Linking to You?

One of the best ways to get your site to the top of search engines, is to have reputable sites linking to your website. It's very easy to find out who and how many organizations and websites are linking to your website or blog.

In Google's Advanced Search, type your url into "Links: Find pages that link to the page"
To find out right now go to google, copy this link, and add your website name: link:www.yourwebsite.com

5 Steps to Getting Reports to the Top of Search Engines

These 5 steps in order from most important, are critical to being found on the web as search spiders go to these first in succeeding order:
1. Title your report to be found.
How would your clients/users/viewers google your information? This is what you want to name your report.
2. Add metadata such as keywords, descriptions, subjects and authors to your PDF document properties and save these to the PDF.
3. Add a title to your webpage.
Make it the same subject, title or keywords as for your report.
4. Use hyperlinks text descriptions on webpages to point to other relevant information within your site.
5. Get links from other organizations linking to your report, website or information.

Stay tuned to the next post to find out who and how many organizations are linking to you.

Corporate Web Marketing

This could easily be called "Powering the Invisible Web" because for corporate marketing using the web, the most important factors are what goes on behind the scenes. Today everyone googles: 91% of hospital CEO's google first to find information they are looking for. So things like search engine optmization, the 5 factors to get reports and information to the top of search engines, are critical to being found and providing credible information for an authoritative source.