Kevin Potts
MAXIMIZE YOUR SEARCH ENGINE MARKETING
Web Design and Marketing Solutions
for Business Websites
for Business Websites
Copyright © 2007 Kevin Potts
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belies the intense process of creation. Making sausage is one, writing a
book is another.
Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business
Websites
is the culmination of not only my time, but my family’s as
well, which was largely spent wondering where I’d gone to for a year.
This book was only possible with their love. My wife, who has dubbed
the project “the other woman in my life,” has been supportive
beyond the call of duty. My three children, who are my sun and air,
have shown a patience that is beyond their young years, even when
demanding their evening bottle or asking to watch
Cars
with them for
the 912
thtime. I love you all, and this book—in its own technical,
About the Author
. . .xviii
About the Technical Reviewer
. . .xix
Acknowledgments
. . .xx
Introduction
. . .xxi
Chapter 1: Overview
. . .1
Chapter 2: Content
. . .21
Chapter 3: Accessibility
. . .37
Chapter 4: Architecture and Navigation
. . .67
Chapter 5: The Homepage
. . .89
Chapter 6: The About Section
. . .111
Chapter 7: Products and Services
. . .145
Chapter 8: Independent Validation
. . .165
Chapter 9: The Corporate Blog
. . .191
Chapter 10: Customer Support
. . .221
Chapter 11: Contingency Planning
. . .243
Chapter 12: Legalese
. . .269
Chapter 13: Search Engine Optimization
. . .285
Chapter 14: Outbound Marketing
. . .315
Chapter 15: Online Advertising
. . .343
Appendix: Resources
. . .369
About the Author
. . .xviii
About the Technical Reviewer
. . .xix
Acknowledgments
. . .xx
Introduction
. . .xxi
Chapter 1: Overview
. . .1
What your website should do . . . 2
Marketing . . . 2
Selling a tangible product . . . 3
Promoting services . . . 3
The whole branding thing . . . 4
Home as advertisement . . . 4
Support . . . 5
Providing extended information . . . 5
The community. . . 5
Customer love . . . 6
Corporate information . . . 7
News and press releases. . . 7
Contact information . . . 7
The corporate blog . . . 7
Redesigning your site . . . 8
Redesign justification. . . 8
Internal pressure . . . 9
Shiny new technology . . . 9
The branding mind-meld. . . 10
Planning the redesign . . . 10
Primary objectives . . . 11
Secondary objectives . . . 12
Appendix: Resources
. . .369
General web design . . . 370
Books . . . 370
Websites . . . 370
Accessibility . . . 371
Articles . . . 371
Books . . . 371
Websites . . . 371
Further resources . . . 371
Corporate Blogging . . . 372
Articles . . . 372
Books . . . 372
Websites . . . 372
Search Engine Optimization . . . 373
Books . . . 373
Websites . . . 373
Further resources and tools . . . 373
Marketing . . . 373
Books on marketing . . . 373
Books on social behavior . . . 374
Websites . . . 374
The Internet encompasses all types of websites, from social media monoliths to individual blogs, from Justin Timberlake fan sites to Fortune 500 businesses. Everyone has a voice, and the medium has become the ultimate level playing field for those seeking to interact with the world through an always-on, instantly available, nearly ubiquitous venue.
Fewer benefit more than businesses. In this sense, the term businessis encompassing; we’re talking about mom-and-pop stores, global giants, local nonprofits, churches, and more— anyone who seeks to create a conversation with customers, clients, patrons, members, and prospects. Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websiteswas written to help make those websites better.
Since the lifeblood of business is fostering customer relationships, it is imperative that a web-site serve that purpose unequivocally. From the very first contact with a prospect, to guiding them through the conversion funnel, to sustaining them with ample support material, to maintaining contact through proactive communication—all of this is designed to attract cus-tomers and keep them satisfied for the duration of the relationship with your company. This book covers the many facets of building a site that serves customers and maintains a positive marketing light on the company. First, the basics: content, accessibility, and architec-ture. Next, the guts of the website: the homepage, the About section, products and services, support, and the blog. After that, enhancing the website: testimonials, legal material, and strong contingency design. Finally, promoting the website: search engine optimization, cus-tomer newsletters, and advertising.
A site that maintains a strong blend of all these aspects will serve the business well, and only help to complement the company’s other marketing goals.
Who this book is for
so whether you are a freelancer consulting with organizations or a member of an in-house team, this book is for you.
If you are looking for hardcore code examples, in-depth explanations of deprecated tags in XHTML, or complicated CSS hacks to get Internet Explorer to work right, there are many other books in the friends of ED catalog that will serve you better. Web Design and Marketing Solutions for Business Websitesis for those who want to improve the perform-ance of their business site through better writing, stronger design, effective usability, and practical analysis—all with an eye toward serving the customer a better experience.
Layout conventions
To keep this book as clear and easy to follow as possible, the following text conventions are used throughout.
Important words or concepts are normally highlighted on the first appearance in bold type. Code is presented in fixed-width font.
New or changed code is normally presented in bold fixed-width font. Pseudo-code and variable input are written in italic fixed-width font. Menu commands are written in the form Menu ➤Submenu ➤Submenu. Where I want to draw your attention to something, I’ve highlighted it like this:
Sometimes code won’t fit on a single line in a book. Where this happens, I use an arrow like this: ➥.
This is a very, very long section of code that should be written all ➥
on the same line without a break.
Contacting the author
E-mail: kevin@graphicpush.com
Writing: www.graphicpush.com
Business website: www.kevinpotts.com
In the awkward growing stages of the Internet, many companies naively contracted design-ers to move their printed brochures online, expecting waves of business from an online populace that was just learning how a browser’s Backbutton worked. But after a year or two, when business only trickled in and few companies saw any return on investment, it was apparent that simply broadcasting a glorified business card did not convince prospects to do business with you.
Since then, the web community has greatly matured. More people know how to navigate the Internet more efficiently and effectively, and they expect more for their efforts. In addition, both businesses and web developers are getting smarter about content, design, usability, and accessibility, and the advent of mass broadband and sophisticated develop-ment languages has enabled levels of interactivity simply not possible—or even imagined— in the 1990s. The Web is now a leading avenue of business, and companies that do not take the medium seriously raise serious red flags in the eyes of a savvy web surfer. Users have almost no patience for poorly designed websites.
From a competitive angle, the Web levels the playing field—every business is lined up on the same street, marketing to the same customers. Companies either thrive or flounder in this flat environment. To thrive, you must deliver beyond customer expectations; better content, sharper design, smarter architecture, and more proactive communication and interaction are all components of websites that produce exceptional results for corporations.
What your website should do
Traditionally, corporate websites have been offensive, built to sell. But offense is not enough. In sports, there are three facets to every successful team: offense, defense, and coaching. The most effective websites have a similar three-pronged approach: marketing to new customers (offense), supporting existing customers (defense), and providing gen-eral corporate information that supports the other two (coaching). Let’s examine these three key tiers more closely.
Marketing
Selling a tangible product
Businesses who can sell products via the Web should build an online shopping cart and provide customers with a means of ordering merchandise. Businesses that manufacture products, but can’t logistically distribute them through the Web (like our McDonald’s example, or Caterpillar, maker of industrial construction equipment), still need to provide a comprehensive outline of their offerings as well as information on where (and how) to buy it.
Starbucks offers an effective hybrid model. Both the company’s physical stores and its online store sell bags of coffee and merchandise, though its branches generate additional revenue selling freshly brewed beverages. While Starbucks would have a difficult time shipping a double tall nonfat latte to your house, it does offer a comprehensive menu of available coffees on its website (www.starbucks.com), as shown in Figure 1-1, along with nutritional information. This is smart offensive design.
1
Figure 1-1.Starbucks not only allows users to purchase its coffee and merchandise online, but also provides a comprehensive list of coffees available at branch locations.
Promoting services
The world’s economy is becoming host to an increasing number of service providers. These companies don’t actually sell a physical product, but rather their knowledge, expert-ise, and opinions. A technology analyst and consulting company like Gartner is the purest form of this business model—Gartner meets and talks with companies, makes recommen-dations on technology purchases, and then charges for its time doing so.
The whole branding thing
A lot has been written about branding on the Web, and how companies can take advan-tage of the medium to push their corporate presence further into the marketplace. Unfortunately, so many factors of branding are intangible qualities—how something
feels—that the move from traditional media like print advertising is not always a smooth conversion.
That being said, the Web presents an entirely new set of tools to sell a company’s brand story to their audience. Design and copy are as important as they have always been, and so is the flavor—or overall thematic feeling—of the presentation, like “professional,” “customer-centric,” “fun,” “engaging,” “family-oriented,” and so forth.
Internet technology allows a deeper immersion into the story through interactive conver-sations. A few companies—especially in the commercial sector—build complex viral sites to help reinforce their brand.1Some agonize over the graphical nuances of a button to
ensure it matches the company’s established visual motif. Others reinvent their marketing language to appeal to a more global audience.
The ageless problem of brand marketing is the difficulty in quantifying return on invest-ment. Most smart companies know they have to invest in their brand development, and constantly tweak messaging to do so, but never fully understand exactly how that invest-ment is being rewarded. On the living Web—where content grows exponentially, new technology is rolled out every few months, and trends come and go faster than reality shows on MTV—building a brand can be a daunting task for any corporation. It takes time, money, and brio. (It may also take nagging the director of marketing to get the green light.)
Home as advertisement
To build market awareness, a company traditionally purchased advertising space in maga-zines, on billboards, and in other printed media that they hoped would be seen by their target audience; radio ads that might be heard by the right people; and television spots that might be seen by their future customers. Unless your business is an ice cream stand or boutique clothing store, you can count on few people actually driving by to purchase any-thing without having seen an advertisement first.
On the Web, the rules have changed. The funnel is flipped. The “headquarters” have become the single most efficient place to advertise. Instead of a physical building trying to cast a wide net of advertising to procure new business, corporations can purchase laser-precise media or write link-worthy content that lures potential customers back to the web-site, where carefully designed pages make the final sale through a shopping cart or push them into making contact with the company.
Few companies have truly embraced the marketing potential of new media. Too many websites are built as static, uninviting brochures that fail to engage the customer; like a corporate office park, the veneer turns people away instead of inviting them to learn more about the institutions. A good website, by contrast, invites prospects in to learn more, poke around, and talk to a salesperson.
Support
Once a company has its first customer, the need for customer support becomes immedi-ate and unavoidable. Different businesses will see their customer support manifest in dif-ferent ways. Software companies need to provide a host of support options, while a manufacturer of cement mix might only need a frequently asked questions (FAQ) page and a phone number to call with questions. Whatever the case, a corporate website should provide patrons with as many tools as possible to get the answer they need without jump-ing through hoops, and if possible, without calljump-ing the company.
Providing extended information
No matter how simple your business model, product or patented process, someone out there will need a better explanation than your homepage provides. The FAQ page is a great place to start. The FAQ can also straddle the marketing sphere; while it addresses questions, the answers could have a marketing spin.
Beyond the high-level FAQ, a company needs to provide in-depth documentation on its products or services. A software company should provide manuals, security updates, and bug fixes on its website; a restaurant should post its menu (and nutritional information if possible); a company that manufactures wood polish should provide information on how to best apply the chemicals. In other words, your company must discuss the practical use of its products or services.
The community
The community is a public forum or similar environment in which customers of the com-pany can interact with one another and representatives of the host corporation. The goal is for users to ask questions knowing they are in the right place, asking the right people. Sometimes the community is simply a message board; sometimes it’s a rich suite of services.
The goal of the community is threefold. First, it relieves a business from having to predict and answer every single question on their own support section. Second, it alleviates stress on the support team when users can simply ask each other instead of submitting support tickets. Third, when people discover others using the same product or service, their pur-chase becomes immediately validated, and a network of more confident patrons is born. A strong community not only becomes a powerful first line of defense in helping answer customer questions, but a self-sustaining internal marketing vehicle as well.
Opera Software makes the Opera browser, an alternative to Internet Explorer. The user base is relatively small (an estimated 1 percent of web users), but extremely enthusiastic. Sensing this zealotry, Opera built a rich community portal that has user-authored blogs, downloads for customizing the software, an active forum, and even photo galleries.2The
site boasts over half a million members (see Figure 1-2).
1
Figure 1-2.Opera Software provides a rich community portal for its fan base.
Customer love
As the old cliché goes, “the best defense is a good offense.” That’s partly true. In the realm of customer support, the best defense is a proactive one. Constantly reaching out to your existing client base and showing your appreciation can have tremendous payoff in both the immediate future and down the road. A well-timed e-mail might retain a customer who was about to leave. That same person, with continued customer care, might person-ally recommend you down the road.
One of the best ways to earn customer appreciation is to make them feel rewarded for being your customer. This can be done through incentives—offering them special discounts, customer appreciation rewards, and so forth—or through special members-only benefits. A customer appreciation newsletter doesn’t just keep them in the loop of the latest com-pany developments, but also contains exclusive offers.
Corporate information
Finally, there are areas of the corporate site that do not directly sell or support products and services. While they might help promote the company in peripheral ways, company information is fairly neutral when it comes to customer relations. A well-written blog post might bring ambient search engine traffic and a well-organized About Us section might help candidates find and apply for open positions, but there is little marketing material and even less customer support.
News and press releases
The concept of press releases goes back to 1906, when an agency working for the Pennsylvania Railroad issued a statement to the press about a train accident before the press had any time to write their own story. Since then, press releases have been used to officially inform media of significant, newsworthy events. Sometimes it’s centered on the company itself—like the grand opening of a new office—and sometimes it’s tied to the company’s offerings, like the launch of a new product or the acquisition of a key competitor.
While the role of press releases has not changed much with the Internet, the means of delivery has. Companies can now archive news on their own website, building a public library of documents that researchers and investors can use for research. In addition, press releases are now distributed to both online and offline media. Besides submitting to the regular avenues, a PR department can cast their net wider with a host of (mostly free) press release websites.
Contact information
It is critical for any company to provide sufficient contact information. This includes the following:
Physical mailing address, even if it’s a PO box
All public phone numbers—main line, support, sales, and so on
A contact form for fielding online inquiries. This is preferred over a plain e-mail address, although those can be important as well
Additional contact information for key personnel or departments, such as company principals, account executives, the public relations department, and so forth A company without clear contact information is difficult to trust. If a business provides only a simple contact form and no phone number or address, visitors might assume they are obfuscating for a reason, and that is never a good way to start a dialog with potential customers.
The corporate blog
For better or worse, the advent of blogs has penetrated corporate websites, and many companies now publish blogs about their company, industry, and competitors. This infor-mal writing style—which can be candid, irreverent, and reactionary—has supporters and detractors arguing both sides of the issue.
It’s easy to see the cons of corporate blogging, or at least predict them. Without an editor, or at least a filter, any employee could regularly lambaste the competition down the street. Unlike controlled writing avenues like press releases, brochures, and speeches, the immediate nature of blogs presents a minefield of legal and professional issues. Despite this, some companies like Microsoft do not use any editorial staff or controlled publishing medium for their employee blogs.
But the pros are equally easy to see. If the right person or team authors the blog, and the writing is interesting and topical, all types of new traffic will be generated—not only from search engines, but from readers passing along a blog post to their coworkers and friends. It is an also a powerful means to demonstrate the company’s expertise and passion for their industry.
Redesigning your site
While there are many people reading this book interested in building a new company’s website, chances are there are just as many people looking to improve an old one. Redesigning can be a major undertaking. Depending on the magnitude, it can be as chal-lenging as a brand new design. But listing the reasons for the revamp and the goals the site will accomplish, and then selling the whole idea to your management team, can help make your site better than ever.
It can be assumed that any business that wishes to compete in the globalized world mar-ket has a website. The medium has been mature for over a decade. College dorm startups, old-world companies (think Ford or Coca-Cola), small businesses, and worldwide mega-corporations have all benefited from and praised the return on investment that a strong Internet presence brings.
Redesign justification
At this point, and probably for the foreseeable future, online initiatives are a given in any corporate marketing plan. A startup might use this book to help build its first website. However, almost any in-house creative department or web design agency will employ this book as a guide for a website redesign. Changing a website can happen for any number of reasons:
The marketing director is still not satisfied with the overhaul from just two months ago and wants to see new ideas (again).
The current website, built on static HTML, has grown beyond its original scope and now needs a content management system to handle the virtual library of content. Government or advocacy groups have insisted that the business meet compliance and accessibility standards.
The company’s lead web designer has learned new techniques that will greatly benefit visitors and the site’s content managers (such as upgrading to a CSS-based layout, adding some nonintrusive JavaScript enhancements, or expanding function-ality on the back-end to meet customer demand).
Whatever the case, it is critical to ensure that the planned redesign addresses the current website’s shortcomings. These could come in many forms.
Internal pressure
Internal pressure is probably the most common driver of website redesigns. In a company of any substantial size, there is a network of people who influence the web presence, from the CEO and director of marketing at the top, down to the creative director, production-level web designers, and content creators. All of them have good ideas, and all of them want to be heard. Within that collective of influencers, the business probably has one key figure that pulls the trigger on any major website decisions, and they spend a good part of their tenure bracing against a constant gale of suggestions. It’s inevitable that one of these suggestions will be the catalyst for a redesign.
Many changes will be visually driven. One of the penalties of operating in a globalized economy is the pressure to constantly cycle through creative ideas, to stay fresh with branding and reinvent the look and feel of your business in order to remain relevant. Sometimes these changes are subtle (maybe a new tagline or an expanded media initia-tive), and sometimes the changes are huge (massive branding campaigns, a logo redesign, or a new set of core messages). It’s the designer’s job to make sure those changes are reflected in the corporate website.
New products or services can also be the genesis for redesigning the website. This is espe-cially relevant to smaller businesses, although larger companies have been known to up-heave their web presence in order to back a new product.
Shiny new technology
There is a certain level of nerdiness all web designers possess. In order to succeed in the industry, it is their responsibility to have their finger on the pulse of the development world, and to forecast the influence of new technologies before they render their current techniques obsolete. No web designer wants their director of marketing (whose job has nothing to do with following web development technology trends) asking about a tech-nology they’ve never heard of.
One of the true thrills of building websites is digging deep into the vast toolbox of tech-nologies and techniques. Since the Web as a medium is constantly refreshing, old tools are being refined and new toys regularly land in the laps of savvy developers:
New CSS techniques
Groundbreaking books on web design, like this one
Sometimes the arrival of a significant new technology can single-handedly drive a redesign. When CSS-based design went mainstream in the early 2000s, thousands of designers immediately saw the benefit of removing presentational markup, and overhauled website code bases to take advantage of this blossoming technology. Similarly, every new version of Flash upgrades the end-user’s experience, from increased usability and accessibility to ever more complex interactive environments.
The branding mind-meld
The increasing number of high-profile mergers and acquisitions is another piece of global-ization fallout. The world market is becoming smaller as major competitors devour one another like sharks in a fishing pond. If nothing else, the constant business activity keeps web designers in business as companies constantly find themselves needing to rebuild or reinvent their websites in order to accommodate the influx of technology and branding clout.
This is a very situational redesign. When a company swallows another one whole, like Oracle did with PeopleSoft in December of 2005, little can be done to stop the identity from being assimilated. However, in the case of Sprint and Nextel, the merger blended the two identities to create a unified public face and eventually a whole new website high-lighting the dual offerings under one domain, as shown in Figure 1-3.
Figure 1-3.When Sprint and Nextel merged, the web design and development team brought the two unique identities under one domain. The screenshot on the left shows Sprint before the merger.
Planning the redesign
To that end, it is critical to craft a detailed list of objectives that the redesign will address. Most (if not all) of the objectives need to be quantitative, not qualitative; the better the results can be measured with hard evidence, the more successful the design will be. For instance, it is easy to promise that the redesign will “look better,” because that is a purely subjective gauge no one can logically refute. However, if the objective is to be WCAG 1.0 Priority Level 1 compliant, or rank in the top ten results for a particular keyword string, or halve the time required for a copy editor to add text through the CMS, then the final product can be compared against these tangible measuring sticks.
Some goals are fundamental to the redesign, while others provide only peripheral bene-fits. In drafting a list of targets, rank them by importance.
Primary objectives
Primary objectives are the big targets, the mountains in the path of the river. These are the core driving factors of the redesign, and as stated previously, should be clearly and objec-tively measurable. You may very well have only one primary goal, such as making your site Section 508 compliant because you do business with the United States government. On the other hand, you may want to accomplish several core objectives in the redesign. Consider the following wish list for a fictional redesign:
1.
Make the website standards compliant by using semantic markup and CSS-based design. Construct the site with valid XHTML.2.
Reduce the average page weight by half to decrease load time.3.
Make the website more accessible by complying with WCAG 1.0 Priority Level 1 guidelines.4.
Add the new company logo and implement the revised style guide for corporate colors.5.
Create consistency in the site’s navigation by replacing the current disparate menus with a collective drop-down menu.6.
Halve the number of steps in the shopping cart checkout process.7.
Use Ajax widgets to improve the interactivity of the shopping cart process.8.
Add a corporate blog written by the CEO.While these are all good objectives, tagging each one as a critical, red-alert, priority-one intention simply dilutes the resources for the core, must-meet goals. Budget, time, and technology constraints might force a team of designers and developers to distill the list down to only two or three.
These few top-level goals are unique to every situation, and only the web developer and his marketing team would be able to accurately rank the preceding list. For instance, it may be critical to get more customers to finish the sales process, so the sixth item might be most important. In addition, the first objective directly contributes to the second, third, and potentially fourth and fifth, so that would also be the primary objective. After consid-eration, our primary goals might look like this:
1.
Make the website standards compliant by using semantic markup and CSS-based design. Construct the site with valid XHTML.2.
Halve the number of steps in the shopping cart checkout process.Secondary objectives
When it comes to a corporate website, there are many vested interests, and one person’s top priority is another person’s afterthought. Web developers often find themselves medi-ators between divided parties. Take advantage of your secondary objectives list to appease disgruntled marketing folk, because these objectives should receive attention during the redesign process, and are likely to be implemented.
Looking at our preceding list, and after huddling with different team members, we might identify secondary objectives as the following:
1.
Reduce the average page weight by half to decrease load time.2.
Make the website more accessible by complying with WCAG 1.0 Priority Level 1 guidelines.By making the site standards compliant from the outset, reducing the page weight will be a given and you’ll already be halfway done with accessibility efforts, since standards com-pliance and accessibility overlap in quite a few areas.
3.
Create consistency in the site’s navigation by replacing the current disparate menus with a collective drop-down menu.The director of marketing, for example, not being tech-savvy, may have a hard time find-ing his way around the site and will want to see a much improved navigation. A lead designer and information architect will also see considerable room for improvement and mark this as a very important secondary objective.
4.
Add a corporate blog written by the CEO.This is something the marketing team has been buzzing about for a while, and the redesign is the perfect opportunity to launch this new section.
Tertiary objectives
The third level of priority could also be called the “nice to have” category, or maybe the “why not, we’re already 90 percent there” category, or even the “hey wait, look what else we get for free” category. In other words, it’s the stuff that is not mission critical, or even all that important, but will make the site better if there’s time to work it in. From the pre-ceding list, and taking suggestions from other team members, a list of tertiary or periph-eral benefits might look like this:
1.
Add the new company logo and implement the revised style guide for corporate colors.2.
Construct the site with valid XHTML 1.0 Strict.Since the redesign is probably happening regardless, it’s a good time to work in the com-pany colors to the CSS file and be done with it. Similarly, having code validate to XHTML 1.0 Strict might come with making the website standards compliant, but it’s certainly not a requirement. And as for the Ajax, that falls clearly into the “if time permits” category.
Selling the redesign
After defining the redesign’s needs and objectives, it’s time to sell the idea to the people who make the decisions—management. If you’re working in-house, it might be your boss, or your boss’s boss, or even that really important guy on the 33rd floor. If freelancing or working in an agency, you’re targeting the same people, but your job is made all that much harder by not working inside the company.
In smaller companies, selling a redesign might come easily if the site doesn’t have much traffic yet, the company is still trying to define its overall market position, and the lack of managerial layers facilitates a more communicative environment. In larger companies, a redesign proposition might be daunting for an outside agency. Bureaucratic red tape is notorious for stifling change. Any major marketing decisions—even if you can prove they will clearly benefit the company—have to be addressed formally and thoughtfully. In other words, politics often come into play.
The better your proposal, the better chance it has for approval. Please note that “better” does not mean “longer.” In fact, getting a proposal read and checked off requires brevity, accuracy, and conviction, but in order to do that, you need to acquire several things.
The research
First and foremost, digging in and researching the industry and technology will provide a strong background going forward. Answer the fundamental questions. What is the state of the browser market and standards compliance? What skill sets need to be acquired to complete the redesign?
The cold hard facts
What will be the tangible, measurable benefits of the redesign? These are the primary, sec-ondary, and tertiary goals just discussed—the quantifiable benefits to the company’s bot-tom line, spelled out in numbers and ranked by importance. These need to be prominent and explained in plain language. Any type of inner-circle nomenclature, buzzword-laden prose, or technobabble will make as much headway with a management team as a pillow through concrete. Simple words, clear messages.
The timeline
Define the length of the redesign process, from start to finish. It’s important to spell this out in as much detail as possible, taking into account the team’s current workload, learn-ing curves for new technology, testlearn-ing phases, and whatever else is pertinent. There are two key rules in laying out the project timeline:
Indicate major landmarks for the process: Don’t package the redesign as one lump project; break the timeline into manageable chunks approvers can understand and measure against. Make sure each milestone can be proven with a tangible product, like a wireframe, a functional comp, or a fully operational beta.
Be honest about the time: Never over-promise and under-deliver; if the project will take six to eight weeks, tell the decision-makers it will take ten, and then surprise them by delivering after only seven.
The cost
The preceding page of advice can be largely ignored, since this is the page every person is going to flip to right away without reading anything else. For that reason, it needs to be meticulous, articulate, convincing, and above all, deliverable. The cost can be measured and broken down several ways:
First, and most easily quantifiable, is the outlay of cash. Does the upgrade require a new server, software upgrade, or more bandwidth? These hard costs should be itemized, grouped by relevance, and totaled.
Second, and harder to predict, are the miscellaneous costs that might arise during the process. Will there be travel costs, or will freelance help be needed to make a deadline? Build a cushion of cash into the budget to plan for the unexpected. Third, and most difficult to gauge, is the time cost. This includes not only the num-ber of man-hours on the project, but also downtime, meetings, other pressing projects that can inconveniently come up, and more. An agency has a definitive hourly rate to work from. For an in-house group, the cost of time can be difficult to translate to stable numbers; if in doubt, simply offer a total number of hours with a quick translation to larger metrics like days, weeks, or months.
Website platforms
There are numerous platforms on which to develop a corporate website—some are turnkey (meaning that everything works right out of the box), and others are customizable solutions ranging from small, free, and open source to large, expensive, and proprietary. Some websites are built entirely in Flash, others in static HTML, and others in closed plat-forms like Lotus Notes and Domino.
HTML vs. Flash
Slow loading time: Flash sites can take minutes to download before the visitor even reaches content. Despite the courtesy of status bars showing the remaining load time, it is still aggravating to wait for content that should be instant. A great deal of the frustration in this point stems from the fact that business sites are almost always architected with content as the focal point. When a person has to wait for a Flash interface to load, they are being withheld the real meat of the website because some designer placed their interests—a glamorous but painstakingly slow design— ahead of the interests of the general audience. This is the definition of bad usability.
Inaccessibility: Although Adobe promotes the accessibility features of recent Flash versions, the fact remains that the tools are weak, and few developers even use them. If a blind or motor-impaired user ever visited a company’s Flash-based web-site, there’s a good chance they would be completely unable to discern the con-tent. See Figure 1-4 as an example of a Flash website that has no meaningful content inside the code.
Search engine hindrances: Because Flash obfuscates text inside SWF files, search engines have no means of reading and indexing the content, because they rely on HTML text to not only see the actual words, but also how those words are organ-ized into a meaningful structure, like headers, paragraphs, and links.
Usability issues: Besides the load-time and accessibility hindrances, Flash introduces other usability concerns, such as breaking the browser’s Back button and the inability to bookmark individual pages.
Figure 1-4.While Flash websites like this one designed by Geary Interactive can often bring the wow
For these reasons and more, traditional HTML is usually the best route when it comes to corporate information websites. The markup language is fundamentally designed to handle text, and browsers are by nature built to quickly and accurately display HTML pages. This allows the greatest number of users to access your information with the fewest possible hindrances.
Content management systems
The goal of a content management system (CMS) is to control a site’s content—text, pic-tures, links, ads, videos, and more—in one single application. The software runs on the server, is tied to a database, and is written with a server-side language like PHP, ASP.NET, Ruby on Rails, or Python. Once a user logs in, they can easily add, update, and delete con-tent, as well as control the templates that drive the presentation of the site. There are lit-erally hundreds of CMSs—many of them free and open source—so it is impossible to detail them all, but here are a few mainstream examples.
WordPress
A blog is a basic example of a CMS: the author logs in, writes a post, and clicks “publish.” WordPress embodies that simplicity, but in doing so, pigeonholes itself as blogging soft-ware without much potential as a true CMS that the rest of the nonblogging company can use.3However, it is free, has a shallow learning curve, and boasts an impressive library of
plug-ins.
Textpattern
Once known as a blogging platform, Textpattern has expanded into a true CMS designed to manage all aspects of a corporate website.4Administrators can control contributing
authors’ permission levels, and the extensible templating system allows for a range of architectural possibilities. Nontechnical authors also praise its elegant and easy-to-use back-end system (shown in Figure 1-5). Like WordPress, Textpattern is free and boasts a dedicated community.
Drupal
Drupal is another free CMS, but it offers a very deep set of functionality far beyond the scope of WordPress or Textpattern.5It was designed from the get-go to be
enterprise-ready, and it offers a considerable range of modules, including simple blogging, integrated forums, user registration, statistics packages, and more. It is free, but demands a much higher learning curve.
3. www.wordpress.org
4. www.textpattern.com
Figure 1-5.Textpattern offers a clean and easy-to-use interface. Administrators can limit content permissions for different user levels.
ExpressionEngine
For businesses looking for a solid, all-in-one package, ExpressionEngine is designed to be a CMS first and foremost, which means both designers and developers will be able to absorb its mild learning curve without much trouble.6The system comes in both free and
com-mercial licenses. One of the benefits of a comcom-mercial license is paid, dedicated support— something that is very important to many companies.
Vignette
In contrast to the free and open source systems, Vignette is a very expensive, proprietary system that is deployed on enterprise-class databases (usually Oracle) and requires a ded-icated support staff.7While it is true overkill for 99.999 percent of all sites on the Web, it
does power some very high-traffic domains like Wired, Motorola, and Ogilvy & Mather.
1
6. www.expressionengine.com
Hosting considerations
No matter how the corporate website is built, the company will need to procure hosting services. Some companies have their own data centers, which might or might not include a web server. For small companies, hosting is best acquired through a third party. The cost of offsite website hosting has become a deal almost too good to be true; for a paltry monthly fee, any company can get gigs of space and bandwidth they’ll probably never use. When choosing a host, consider several metrics:
First, make sure the host is compatible with your publishing platform. If the sites are constructed with static HTML or authored in Flash, this is not a concern, but any CMS will have a minimum set of requirements the host needs to meet. An ASP.NET application will need a Windows server, while the PHP-based WordPress and Textpattern installations work best on Apache with MySQL databases.
Get the most bang for your buck. Compare prices and features, and absolutely do not accept any advertisements on your site placed there by the host.
Go with a respected name in hosting. Media Temple, Rackspace, Go Daddy, and DreamHost have all been in the game a long time, possess large customer bases, and boast good support. Too many small hosts have unreliable uptime and ques-tionable customer service.
Summary
While it would be easy to start this book diving headfirst into design, it would be a dis-service to the first cornerstone of the Internet: the written word. Text is the Web’s foun-dational element, from the earliest Gopher servers housing physics papers to the millions of web pages published through corporate websites, personal blogs, and social networking domains like MySpace.
Sharing text was the reason the Internet was invented in the first place. Text is searchable, scannable, and transportable; it can be moved from file to file, program to program, lan-guage to lanlan-guage. It can be sent thousands of miles in half a second or distributed to a million inboxes at the click of the Send button. Rarely has a medium fit the platform so perfectly.
After distilling all responsibilities down to a base level, the core role of a web designer or information architect is to build an environment that illuminates the content crafted by copywriters and blessed by the marketing team. The entirety of this book and its ideas all serve the same grand purpose: to deliver the message of the site.
In the world of corporate web design, this is critical to remember. Many websites feature elegant layouts and refined typography, exalting the text. But just as often, designers and marketers overthink a project, and a potentially simple design devolves into a complex lay-out that actually hinders reading, when time could be better spent writing and editing the marketing message. For better or worse, the Internet is too often a living case study of art deco mentality: time, effort, and money spent on embellishing the perfectly functional. People visit corporate sites to get information. Sometimes they are already customers and have a question, and they hit the Support section. Sometimes they’ve heard about you, but need to clarify a few details about one of your widgets, so they visit the Products page. Sometimes they stumble across your domain by pure coincidence, and browse the About section to figure out what exactly you do. Whatever the reason, the visitor is going to con-sume content—video, animations, diagrams, photographs, and, most importantly, text. The raison d’etreof the web designer is to make sure this content is findable, available, and accessible.
This chapter covers what website designers, copywriters, marketing strategists, and every-one else involved in the site needs to know about copy for the Web. This not only includes the unnecessary obfuscation of content and trouble words to avoid, but best practices in layout and typography that lead to more digestible words.
To compete, you need to be found
Worldwide business is changing every day. Globalization is reaching full steam. The world’s economy is flattening, and the old economy giants of brand-name business are faltering beneath the growing power of the long tail.1 In just over a decade, the rulebook for
1. The long tailis a term first coined by Chris Anderson in an October 2004 article for Wired
marketing economics has been tossed aside. The Web has leveled the playing field, and any company can serve any customer with an Internet connection, at any time of day, and from any part of the world.
No longer must you buy Tide detergent. A simple search for “laundry detergent” brings up dozens of alternate brands eating away business from Procter & Gamble, many of them from Internet-only mail order companies. No longer must you buy music at the mall. Hundreds of music shops—many of them serving narrow niches like classic jazz or hip hop—thrive on the Web by catering to the customer who wants a deeper selection of uncommon releases.
The always-on, instantly searchable, globally connected Web offers a tremendous platform for businesses small and large to compete with equal footing. Millions of companies have seen the Internet’s potential, and the medium is teeming like a jar of sea monkeys with marketers vying for your business. But this new landscape introduces a new problem. Or rather, reintroduces an old problem: how to differentiate yourself and win business over your competition.
Consider a local music store called Armand’s. They compete with the downtown mall shop and another record store a few blocks away. Their biggest problem came when the com-petitor marked his 12-inch singles down to $5.99 and theirs were still $6.99. Despite this, business remained strong because everyone knew Armand’s name, where they were located, and the variety of the merchandise, and the helpfulness of the staff.
By contrast, an online shop has thousands of competitors, all lined up on the same “street,” each with relatively equal pricing and selections. The Internet flips the archetype of the brick-and-mortar store. The new twist on the age-old problem turns out to be deceivingly simple—to succeed on the Web, you must be found in the first place. Old paradigm: the phone book. New paradigm: search engines. Google, Yahoo, and MSN have supplanted the slabs of dead trees thrown on our doorstep every six months, and their information is a hundred-fold deeper and updated every second of every day. There is one critical differentiator between these models. Search engines are more than directories of names and addresses. They index every word of your website, offering a richer representation of your business, and then attach that data to a geographic location if one exists. Today, users can search by physical location or keywords. As you can see in Figure 2-1, Google can find Armand’s store by keywords (“hip hop records”) or by location.
This abrupt exposure has forced companies to reexamine their content. Marketers are no longer able to control whose hands their brochures fall into, and by publishing on the Web, they are effectively inviting a billion people to learn more about their business. Some people might type in “detergent.” Others, “discount detergent refills.” Still others, “environment-friendly detergent alternatives.” Each combination is going to bring up a dif-ferent set of results, but at the top of each ranking will sit the company who wrote about these topics in plain, clear, concise language.
Figure 2-1.Businesses can be found by keyword or geographic location.
To be found, you need to say something
Here’s the reality: people search with words that make sense to them. For most people, that means plain, short, common words, not the oblique marketing speak so prevalent on the Web.
Too many corporate sites (and the technology sector is by far the most consistent offender) feature marketing messages so pregnant with buzzwords, made-up phrases, and convoluted clauses that it’s questionable whether the original writer has any clue what he was trying to communicate.
The company that speaks in everyday vernacular will simply appeal to a wider customer base. For instance, people will not type “integrated premises-based ECM solution” into a search engine. So if your site says that, you are missing a disproportionately large segment of your target audience. Someone might type in “content management for accounts payable.” Maybe. More likely, that person will search for “software to organize invoices,” and then find the company that solves this problem without talking about all of that ECM mumbo jumbo.
language will be a decisive advantage. Not only because your website will appear more often in search rankings, but also because readers can understand your message when they visit your domain.
People will always recommend products and services they understand, never ones they don’t. No world leader ever gained power by speaking above his followers, and no song-writer ever hit stardom for not making sense (except Bob Dylan, but even he made sense some of the time). People will consume and pass along messages they grasp and relate to—like a website their moms can use to buy environmentally friendly detergent.
Writing better copy for the Web
If there’s one axiom of global commerce, it’s that companies that cannot be understood lose business. Ask any English-speaking businessperson traveling to France, Saudi Arabia, or Japan; most figured out long ago that learning the native language was a significant competitive advantage. On the Web, the axiom still applies. There is simply no point is throwing mud into the water of language. Obfuscation kills communication.
The goal of your domain should be to open a dialog with a customer, prospect, or investor, not intimidate them. This requires communicating in plain language, not hiding behind opaque words, and is best accomplished by avoiding corporate speak and writing for your target audience.
Avoiding corporate speak
Imagine walking into a pastry shop, asking for a Boston cream doughnut, and getting the following response from the shopkeeper: “That particular confection, with its falsely his-torical nomenclature of alternate-dessert elements and synergistic relationship with first light beverages, presents a best-of-breed banquet that yields sweet savor from the first morsel of brunette icing to the last swallow of golden cream. It is also currently out of stock, but we’ve leveraged our advanced dessert replacement solutions to replenish the inventory.”
You would probably leave. As you walked down the street looking for a Dunkin’ Donuts, you’d wonder how that bakery ever stayed in business. Visiting any number of corporate sites on the Web, you could easily wonder the same thing. Here are three fictional exam-ples of typical corporate speak:
Example 1: “Although our software can be premises-based or deployed as a fully hosted solution, we allow companies to automate and streamline processes, progress organiza-tional efficiency, and concentrate on governance and compliance through the direct man-agement and explicit control of content.”
Example 2: “A person-centric architecture is at the core of our products. Whether imple-mented into an enterprise system or interfaced as a particularized solution, our laboratory software offers unparalleled functional competence.”
Example 3: “Leverage the power of ever-increasing interconnected media channels by inspecting them through a marketing lens. This integrative archetype affords businesses a new context proven for retooling marketers to rethink clients working in a rewired market.”
This trend toward what writer Erin Kissane calls “zombie copy” blossomed with the advent of the Web, and hit critical mass around the time the first dot-com bubble burst in 2001.2
Traditional selling collateral rarely required such language because most sales efforts were focused on consumers. But the economic tsunami of the technology sector brought a massive influx of postmodern business-to-business marketing, and companies quickly found themselves stumbling over superlatives, euphemisms, and run-on sentences. There’s no obvious reason why this occurred, but it’s fair to say a combination of factors were at work, including the following:
To make the product or service appear more complex than necessary
To make the company itself appear smarter than its customers and thus subcon-sciously claim authority on the topic
To make their target audience feel smarter To use the thesaurus more often
The trend, thankfully, seems to be waning. Many companies have scaled back the layers of nonsensical verbiage, put their thesauruses back on the shelf, and started writing in plain language again, like their forefathers in advertising taught them. The more your company exercises this, the more effective and far-reaching its marketing material will be in the market.
Have mercy on the thesaurus
The torrent of bad writing has left a graveyard of once-valid, now-cliché words in its wake. In the California Gold Rush of 1848 and 1849, thousands of people tore through rock and stream to find any speck of gold their prospecting neighbor up the stream left behind. In the late 1990s, the American English Thesaurus became a similar victim of pillaging. Suddenly, plain English wasn’t good enough. Use was replaced by utilize,company was made obsolete by enterprise and the use of acronyms—the ultimate achievement in euphemistic writing—was suddenly so fashionable you could invent them on the fly and people would almost applaud. This swath of abuse sent dozens of useful but relatively uncommon words crashing down into a pit of clichédom. Couple this with the invention of new words (seriosity) and the trend of ridiculous modifiers (world-class), and we suddenly have a template for how notto write.
Following are a few words that have had their character ground away by unrelenting use (or is that utilization?):
Solution: Probably the poster child for corporate-speak abuse, this once great word now appears on an incalculable number of company websites. Unfortunately, while elegant, it has little meaning when orphaned, especially in a site’s navigation. The word is still valid when meaning an actual answer to a problem, but not when used as a replacement for more tangible words like productsor services.
Utilize: The major problem with utilizeis that it is simply overused. It may or may not be a direct replacement for use; in different situations, its meaning can con-note something slightly different. For example, I can usethis shovel to dig a hole (its intended purpose), or I can utilizethis shovel to smash this lock open (an unin-tended use, no matter how practical). However, the problem lies in the fact that copywriters use utilize even when its monosyllabic cousin would be clearer and more to the point.
Enterprise: This word is just a flowery alternative to company. Who can seriously tell me they don’t think of Star Trek when they read it? A prime casualty of the-saurus abuse, try the more humane company,organization, or businessinstead.
Leverage: This is another alternative for use, but with major bonus pretension points. While a real word with real meaning, it hardly ever relates to the marketing material in which it finds itself. Your software might leverageyour client’s IT invest-ment, but it more likely takes advantageof that investment instead.
Best-of-breed: This one just has to stop. Probably one of the most pompous descriptors to come into common use, best-of-breedis a term best left to award ceremonies at dog shows. A marginally better best-in-classcould be employed, or you could just stop writing empty modifiers and talk more about the real-world benefits of your company’s product.
Writing with clarity also requires the immediate cease-and-desist of trying to write with pomposity. People who try to write over the heads of their audience nearly always fall short; after all, what is the benefit of confusing your readers with sentences thicker than tar and as appetizing as sawdust? Removing these common sins from the copywriting tool-box can help further the cause of intelligibility:
Invented words: Making up words not only complicates language, but suggests one of two things: either the writer was not intelligent enough to think of a perfectly decent word, or the company regards its self-worth high enough to warrant its own secret language. There are many rather funny examples, but just keep in mind that verbing nouns only increases the complexification of wordspeak.
Acronyms: These poisonous little strings of letters are the darlings of technology pundits everywhere, from software makers to commercial equipment manufac-turers to government agencies. Very few are valid. Just for fun, try to guess what these stand for: SERP, ECM, XSLT, OPML.
Superfluous modifiers: Modifiers are the subtle little attachments to nouns that make the subject sound just a bit better. Like a good pair of shoes, they provide fla-vor to the package—and, like a pair of hot-pink knee-high Nancy Sinatras, can quickly become distasteful. We discussed best-of-breedin the preceding list; world-class,unprecedented, and others also appear with uncomfortable frequency.
Write for your audience, not your ego
Avoiding obfuscation is the first critical step in a more readable website. Thinking about what your audience wants to read—and how they want to read it—is the second. Many copywriters indulge themselves with big words and heavy-handed messaging. Avoid this. Edit copy to a common denominator by assuming your reader knows nothing. This means offering the full story, in clear language, so search engines index you, readers find you, and customers refer you.
Larger companies have dedicated editors for web copy. These folks understand the golden rules of brevity and clarity. Unfortunately, these wise companies are the minority, so it is important that web designers, information architects, and others involved with the project understand what makes words work well so they can collaborate with the copywriter to produce the most reader-friendly messaging.
Provide the whole story
Don’t assume people know what you do, how you do it, where you are, or when you started. Providing all this information offers people the whole picture of your company. Leaving out a key piece of the puzzle just annoys visitors and puts them off going any fur-ther. For instance, a web page describing the services of the company should be rich with detail, whether marketing copy, testimonials, or illustrations. Failing to adequately inform readers about what the company does and its methodologies results in only one thing: less interest.
Short paragraphs
The print medium provides designers tremendous creative freedom. If they want 2-inch columns, text set at 8 points and the background a light gray, there’s not a darn thing the reader can do about it. This flexibility in design accommodates different content styles as well; our example of carefully designed columns would handily fit denser type and longer, multi-sentence paragraphs.
The Internet ignores all constants. Text size is dictated by the user, and long paragraphs of text can quickly become unwieldy on a wide monitor, causing reading speed and informa-tion reteninforma-tion to plummet. Because of this unpredictability, the best web content is writ-ten like newspaper copy: short paragraphs that focus on one thought and rarely exceed three sentences. This fast-paced style organizes thoughts into easily digestible chunks, and helps the eye travel from block to block through the copious whitespace.
So how long is a paragraph on the Web? A 50-word paragraph is reasonable; shorter is better. It has been demonstrated over and over again that readers scan web content quickly, rarely lingering to readand fully digest the information. Short paragraphs oblige this pattern.
Bullets
Keep bullets short and punchy. Group them together in logical clumps. Don’t overuse them.
It’s best to mix bullet points with paragraphs to break up content and keep the eye moving. This also avoids feeling too much like PowerPoint. Also, be careful that your bullets— which are intended to abbreviate and highlight key messages—do not obfuscate your message. It is entirely too easy to truncate a complete thought so much that it becomes meaningless to your readers.
Reading level
Most television sitcoms are written at an eighth-grade reading level to appeal to the widest audience possible. News and editorial programs might be written for a more educated audience, but I would bet that if you sat a class of 13-year-olds in front of the TV, they would understand almost every word on CNN. Television is written by professionals who know how to speak to a broad demographic in a common language. It would be wise for companies to follow TV’s lead. It’s common to assume your audience is more educated than they really are, but even if that’s true, people don’t want to think too hard when reading, especially on the Web, where the term readingis used loosely.
Examples of clarification
Taking into consideration everything covered up to this point in the chapter, let’s take another look at the examples of the thick corporate speak referenced earlier, and see if we can’t increase the signal-to-noise ratio to get a clearer meaning. Here is the first one: Example 1: “Although our software can be premises-based or deployed as a fully hosted solution, we allow companies to automate and streamline processes, progress organiza-tional efficiency, and concentrate on governance and compliance through the direct man-agement and explicit control of content.”
This is not bad copywriting per se, it’s just heavy-handed. It’s technically correct, but the cacophony of big words wearies the brain. Here is the same message, but with lighter, sim-plified text:
Example 1 (edited): “Our software introduces new ways to organize your corporation’s many kinds of content, increasing employee efficiency and helping to meet compliance regulations. The software can be installed locally in your company, or hosted through our datacenter.”
The message is still there, but the delivery is not as dense.
Example 2: “A person-centric architecture is at the core of our products. Whether imple-mented into an enterprise system or interfaced as a particularized solution, our laboratory software offers unparalleled functional competence.”
The second example is tougher, because while the sentence is long and uses colorful words like person-centricand interfaced, it’s not actually saying too much. Here’s a possi-ble revision:
Example 2 (edited): “Our products, built with the user in mind, help make your laboratory more efficient.”
It’s not particularly mind-blowing, but it’s about the best we can do with such thin raw material.
Example 3: “Leverage the power of ever-increasing interconnected media channels by inspecting them through a marketing lens. This integrative archetype affords businesses a new context proven for retooling marketers to rethink clients working in a rewired market.”
This final example is just bad copy. The writer is trying way too hard, and the final text is a plate of syrupy mush lacking any kind of intellectual nutrition. The message is there, and it’s fairly simple once all the layers of language are peeled away:
Example 3 (edited): “Using a combination of marketing media, you can reach new customers.”
Design considerations for content
Some web designers may think they are perfectly justified in glazing over this chapter. It is after all, about content, not design, or even traditional information architecture. But the reality is that the two elements are fundamentally bound, like hydrogen and oxygen atoms in a water molecule. In fact, their symbiosis is driving many designers to become increas-ingly conscious of web content—what messaging works and what doesn’t, how people react to typography decisions, how people scan content within a page, and so forth. Every day new research offers deeper insight into how the masses interact with content. Those theories and best practices filter down and permeate the decisions driving how interfaces, navigation elements, body text, and more are actually designed.
In a traditional marketing structure, designers design and writers write. Large organizations might even have a dedicated copywriter for the Web. A medium-sized business might retain a copywriter who handles both print and web content. But in a small company, one person could easily comprise the entire in-house marketing team, and their job is to both write copy and get it live on the site.
