Do You Know Your Website Too Well?

Have you ever known someone so intimately that you missed the obvious?

I know, that’s a deep question to launch a blog post with isn’t it?  Don’t worry – I’m not delving into the area of human relationships here.

I’m going to dig into our relationship with our website.

Since you created your website, you know it pretty well.  You know where everything is and when it was added.  If I ask you to point me to a resources you could find it in three seconds flat and provide me with a link.

Because you know it inside and out – you may not realize that what you can find in a heart beat, other people who have visited your website have no clue even exists.

You believe that you have created a masterful, rich resource website and contains the answers to every need known to your target market and it may be true – but the question is, can your visitors find the answers they are looking for?

One way to really know that is to ask someone who is unfamiliar with your site to visit it and give you their impressions.

• Ask them to tell you what they perceive the website to be about.
• Give them a short list of important resources that can be found within your site and ask them how long it takes them to find each one, how many clicks they made to get there and to let you know if they do not find them at all.
• Ask them what they would tell someone else about you based on what they’ve experienced at your website.

Finding someone who will be honest in answering your questions may be difficult.  Friends have a tendency to put a shine on things so don’t ask a buddy to do it unless you know they are comfortable with giving constructive criticism.

If you don’t know anyone who you think can be straightforward with you, I invite you to join us at Mom Masterminds for a free preview.  You can ask for a site critique and ask those specific questions I’ve suggested and get clear responses from our members.

Here are some things I look at when critiquing a large resource site:

Simple Navigation

Can I get everywhere in your site within a couple of clicks by starting with your navigation list?  Or have you tucked pockets of rich information deep into the recesses of your site?  (If I have to click six times to reach something, I will probably never even know it’s there.)

There are times when you’re breaking up a long article into multiple pages that you’ll be asking your users to click several times to consume the whole thing and there is a good purpose in this as far as building page views and displaying more ads – but make sure that each click is valuable to the visitor and that they never lose a sense of where they are on your site.

Clearly Grouped Ideas

If I click on a link that says ‘Marketing Resources’ am I going to find articles or links about motivation mixed in?  Sometimes you are making a connection between two ideas that makes perfect sense to you – but will be confusing to others.

Each Page Has A Purpose

Every page that you create on your website has a job to do and a primary task should be obvious.  If I can’t identify a primary purpose, I would ask you to tighten things up.  After clearly targeting one specific goal for a page it’s good to offer one or two ‘back up’ response options such as links to related resources, similar posts or contextual advertising.

If you have an older site you may discover that it is in great need of a good housecleaning or remodeling.  Don’t be intimidated.  Now could be a perfect time to move your site into Wordpress and take advantage of all of the time saving, Web 2.0 tools that are available to us now.

I’ve never heard anyone say that the regretted giving a site an overhaul so if you need one, just go for it.