These next two posts are going to be about a couple of retail sites selling wigs and prom dresses, and how BWI’s usability analysis could help them out a lot.

Today’s site is e-Wigs.com. Their most popular product/page they have is Raquel Welch Wigs. Looking at a screenshot of the page two things stand out to me immediately.

Looking at the top and left menu you can see both are difficult to read. If their visitors don’t find a Raquel Welch wig they may just leave. Opportunity lost on showing off the rest of their product line. Having easy to read, and easy to skim content is essential. Web surfers move lightning fast, and Google Search to another site is often just a click a way.

The other item is the general appearance of the home page. If you are spending any money marketing a site, bounce rate has to be in contronl first. A key to making online sales is to have a professional appearing site. It’s ads to the sites trust factor. A first appearance to this site would reveal content that is not vertically aligned, and a background that wraps poorly on the right. All of this could be fix in just a few minutes  because overall the template of the site is good. A quick margin adjustment for the alignments, and if this were my site, removal of the wrapping background. I would simply make the background of the content white, and the text black. Easy reading, and immediately a more professional look. It could also help make the menus more visible.

So taking just two items from BWI’s analysis, appearance of home page and scannability of text, reveals two easy fixes. A half hour of work, and this site could reduce their bounce rate of new visitors, increase page views, and most importantly increase sales.

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What’s the matter with your website? Well…most likely lots of stuff. Most webmasters that are trying to improve their website are looking for ways to increase their sales, increase hits, and to simply get more positive action out of their visitors. It’s a tall order to accomplish all three, but it’s hardly impossible.

Defining Your Site

There are all sorts of free online test you can do to help improve your site, but the best thing you can do is to truly define your site to yourself. What the primary objective? Does it have more than one objective? Are you accomplishing any of the sites objectives well? Does it even have an objective besides getting tons of visitors?

Before you go out testing your site, repairing code, making new logos, stuff like that…know what and why the heck you are doing it. Otherwise you could be just spinning your wheels, and even worse, wasting money.

Getting Professional Feedback

Spending $79.95 on an analysis like the one offered by Best Web Image may seem like a waste of money. Who wants an analysis that basically bashes a website, especially when on a tight budget. If your sites business plan, or what I like to call “Site Plan” is focused on making a profit though, getting a heuristic analysis like this is essential.

The most important reason to get an analysis is the fact that it’s someone else’s eyes that will be determining the quality of your site. This is extremely critical because the odds are, you most likely want someone besides yourself to like your site. Way, way, way too often websites get built without one simple review from another person. Are you sure your site works fine? I’ve seen plenty of order forms that don’t work, and you know the webmaster want those forms to work.

Getting Feedback From Others is Good, Kind Of

Getting feedback from others is great, and is something I value most. Unfortunately feedback from others is often difficult to develop a plan from. Comments like “It’s great” or “It’s O.K.” doesn’t mean much. Hundreds of “it’s great” would be nice, but it still doesn’t tell you, as a webmaster, how to improve a site. Positive feedback may even decrease your sales. If your goal is to sell something, and all you do is cater to the positive feedback that, say for example, your site has great resources. Your focus might move toward pushing new visitors onto those resources. An initial plan to sell and make money has now been put on the back burner to accommodate general visitor feedback. Oops!

Why BWI’s Analysis is Essential for a New Webmaster

Having a heuristic analysis is critical to the things that matter most to you, getting visitors to accomplish your sites primary objective. An analysis is structured, it identifies known industry problems for visitors, and in the case of Best Web Image’s analysis, give reasoning for all of it’s findings.

Best Web Image’s Web Usability and Design Analysis can almost be used as a basic website standard for new and old webmasters. An actual standard for websites goes way beyond the analysis, but to give you an example what I mean here is the first item of business, Title of Site. It looks at the length, the keyword quality, and the “does it even make sense” quality. It would even identify if the title would make a poor bookmark. The first item of the analysis could substantially improve your return visitor rate, search engine positioning, usability, and credibility. ROI could be accomplished with this one bit of information. The analysis continues this way covering basic items that most webmasters simply don’t pay attention to, and they really should. Another example would be to see if your site has a contact page. It does? Good, well the analysis doesn’t stop there. It reports the quality of the contact page, ways it could be improved, and reasoning on how a poor contact page could effect your sales.

What Does The Analysis Cover?

The entire analysis, thirty five checks in all, offer extremely valuable checks for any webmasters. It looks at: navigation, site credibility, basic design concepts, forms, and the effectiveness of those forms. Many of the items on the list are expected by most web surfers, but as webmasters we often forget what all of those items are. The analysis checks for site inconsistencies, accessibility features or lack of, and its development for search engines. Delete all the answers from an analysis and a webmaster could use this repeatedly for all of their sites.

Two additional key factors for the analysis is the “Why It Matters” for every item looked at, and the conclusion of findings. It’s one thing to have someone tell you why you should change, it has a little more value though when there is substantial reasoning why. The conclusion of the analysis is a “What I would do first if this were my site” comment.

Your analysis might reveal several things that could use some improvement, and fixing them all at once might not be practical. Having knowledge of what should be fixed first reflects the level of importance, and will help a new webmaster in their decisions on what, if any, changes should be made.

To Get The Analysis

To get the thirty-five point analysis offered by Best Web Image you can go here: Web Usability and Design Analysis – Expectations should be set on “High”.

There are a few other analyses offered by Best Web Image, but if you want the most bang for your buck, I would suggest simply getting the one listed above. Regardless of experience levels webmasters are repeatedly impressed by this, really, low cost report.

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I just wrote a post on my main blog about the top ten website mistakes. Hope you check it out, and give it a digg if you like. The number one mistake I found was the incorrect use of heading tags.

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Are you a webmaster? Do you have a method to handling Mondays, and making them part of a successful week? If you do, let me know. I am starting a new weekly post on my main site, Best Web Image.

Manic Mondays

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Do you use any landing pages for a product or service you are selling? Using more than one could make a big difference to do the same job can make a big difference. CSSLanding Pages.com has a ton of them, and you can get them all for just $19.

It’s Not as Good as You Think

A common problem with relying on one landing page, or one design, is that they are most likely not as good as you think. It may be good really, but the odds say there is a better performing layout just waiting to be used. I have been using this method for a while now, and my last landing page campaign, didn’t fail to surprise me. I made five different layouts. Three of them I thought were slam dunks, and the other two I just kind of rushed out with not much care. Right now those two sloppy pages are the ones cranking the sales. Who figured? Now I am working on converting the high quality ones to incorporate the better performing ones. Hopefully those will outshine the current best.

It’s All Parallel

Using parallel designs and parallel layouts is nothing new, and it is a very effective method of building a campaign. In fact, I would say you are not ready to begin a campaign until you have multiple layouts. I’ve seen a bunch of template sites that usually sell them for around $50 each, but if you check out CSSLanding Pages.com you can get ten landing page templates that have sixteen themes each for just $19. That’s a killer deal, and an easy way to create parallel layouts on the fly.

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