No Erasers.

Top Ten Mistakes in Web Management

// March 25th, 2009 // Business & Strategy

The development of a great web site requires the synergy of solid strategy, a comprehensive understanding of the audience AND great design. The usability of a website is more a function of how it is managed than of how good its designers are.

Taken from a truly prescient posting from Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, written way back in 1997, but still incredibly insightful and relevant today.

Here’s what you need to know:

Web design and development involves three key levels:

- Web Management
- Interaction Design
- Content Design

Like a hamburger, the middle layer is the most tasty and attracts more attention. The outer two layers are just as important: ultimately users only care about content (the medium is not the message) the usability of a website is more a function of how it is managed than of how good its designers are.

Some classic mistakes in managing the design of a website:

1. Not Knowing Why

This is the number one problem, all right. I am amazed how many websites are built simply because some executive told somebody to do it without telling them what the site should achieve. And no, it is not an acceptable reason that “everybody else is doing it.”

For credibility purposes, it may be OK to make a “business-card site” with a small amount of corporate image building. However, doing so is not the most effective use of the Web, and a site along these lines should only be built as a result of an explicit decision not to invest in active use of the Web for business.

Most companies should start their web design project by finding out ways in which they can provide true customer value on their site. Give users benefits from spending time on your site, allow them to do business with you, and their money will follow.

2. Designing for Your Own VPs

Internally-focused sites cause companies to end up with home pages full of mission statements, photos of the CEO, and corporate history. Remember that your company is not the center of the universe for your customers. The site should be designed with customers’ needs in mind and not to promote grandiose ideas of self-importance. Do not build a site that your top executives will love: they are not the target audience.

3. Letting the Site Structure Mirror Your Orgchart

Users should not have to care how your company is organized, so they should not be able to deduce your org structure from the structure ofyour website – doing so results in an internally-centered rather than a customer-focused site.

Site structure should be determined by the tasks users want to perform on your site.

4. Outsourcing to Multiple Agencies

The problem with using multiple agencies is that each of them want to put their own stamp on the site: both because they have different design philosophies and because they will want to use you as a reference account.

Users get very annoyed when they move between pages on a site and find drastically varying designs at every turn. Consistency is the key to usable interaction design: when all interface elements look and function the same, users feel more confident using the site without having to learn everything over again for each new page.

5. Forgetting to Budget for Maintenance

As a rule of thumb, the annual maintenance budget for a website should be about the same as the initial cost of building the site, with 50 percent as an absolute minimum. If you simply spend the money to build a glamorous site but do not keep it up to date, your investment will very rapidly turn out to be wasted.

The Web currently changes so rapidly that a major redesign is needed periodically simply to avoid a completely outdated look and to accommodate changing user expectations. Additional maintenance is needed throughout the year to bring fresh content online, reorganize and revise old pages.

6. Treating the Web as a Secondary Medium

One rarely gets a gourmet meal by repurposing yesterday’s leftovers. Similarly, even if you repurpose very valuable non-Web content, you will at best get a slightly valuable website. The Web is different from television, newspapers, and glossy brochures, you cannot create a good website out of content optimized for any of these older media. The old analogy still holds: movies are not made by filming a play and putting the camera in the best seat of the theater. Most content creators have been trained to develop linear content for traditional media: They have to consciously push themselves to work differently than their natural approach, so unless you mandate thrm to produce their material specifically for the Web, you may end up with substandard Web content

7. Wasting Linking Opportunities

The Web is a linking medium: the hypertext links are the foundation of the Internet itself.. Most companies now religiously include their URLs in all advertising, TV commercials, press releases, and even in the products themselves. Unfortunately, most of these URLs are generic and do not provide users with any payoff that is related to the context in which the user found the URL. If you are running a campaign with a certain theme, have it include a URL to a page that follows up on that theme. The payoff page should not be a copy of the ad (the customer presumably already read the ad already).

8. Treating Internet and Intranet Sites the Same

Internal intranet Web sites need to be managed very differently from public Internet sites. The key difference is that intranets can be tightly managed to a greater degree of consistency and predictability – employees use the intranet for corporate productivity, meaning that any waste of users’ time is a direct hit to the bottom line.

9. Confusing Market Research and Usability Engineering

Many companies now understand the value of customer data for design, but many of them rely solely on traditional market research like focus groups. These methods typically relate to creating desire for a product and getting it sold. Web design is an interactive, and therefore usability testing methods are the only way to understand what actually happens during the user’s interaction with the site.

There are endless stories of customers who say in focus groups that they would love a certain feature, but who never use it once it is launched because it is too cumbersome, too expensive, or doesn’t really meet their needs in real use. .

10. Underestimating the Strategic Impact of the Web

It is a huge mistake to treat the Web as if it were an online brochure. The Web should be considered one of the most important determinants for the way you will do business in the future. If you don’t grasp these new business opportunities you will be toast in a few years.

A classic error in predicting technology shifts is to over-estimate short-term impact and under-estimate its long-term impact. Companies often overestimate what it can do the next year or two: most websites are not going to turn a profit any time soon.

But please don’t underestimate what will happen once we reach the (rapidly approaching!) goal of everyone, everywhere; connected.