What type of information do you need to start redesigning your site to be customer-centric and usable? You need to understand why your visitors are coming to your site and what they’re looking for. This type of information is going to come mainly from your analytics software. If you don’t have any analytics software, you need to get one to improve your site. Google Analytics is offered for free or you can have someone set it up for you for minimal cost. (I go over analytics and a few packages to explore in the post Measuring Your Success in the B2B Marketplace.)

You’ll need some information from your analytics package to begin with: the keywords people are typing into search engines to get to your site, what people are clicking on once on your site, and where people are leaving your site.

• Keyword information is sometimes called keywords, sometimes referring sites. Collect a list of your top 100 keywords for the previous six months categorized by search engine. Are there products or content searched for specifically by title or name? These are should have links accessible right from the homepage to make them easy for people to find.
• To see what people are clicking on once on your site find a report of your top pages. If your analytics package offers a site overlay, this will be particularly valuable to see where people are clicking on each page.
• Where people are leaving your site gives you an indication what made them leave. This information is often under exit pages and sometimes in path information. Are their exit pages where people consistently leave your site?  These may need to be redesigned to keep visitors on your site longer.

Google’s Webmaster Tools can also give you valuable information about how Google’s search engine looks are your site - with information about the top keywords, pages that Google has in its index, and the top queries from Google to your site. Yahoo has a similar, but not as robust tool, SiteExplorer, which can also give you some valuable information.

If you have a search function on your site, take a look at the logs. Visitors often search for things they cannot find on first glance. If you have important products or content that are constantly being searched for, they should have links on your homepage.

Next step - basic layout lessons in B2B Website Usability Basics - Part 2 - Layout

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, usability, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

As mentioned in a previous post, usability is important in designing a customer-centric site. Usability, as defined by Wikipedia:

Usability is a term used to denote the ease with which people can employ a particular tool or other human-made object in order to achieve a particular goal.

In the non-Internet world, we expect certain things to be in a certain place and to act in a certain way. In the US, traffic lights have red (stop) at the top, yellow in the middle, and green (go) at the bottom. Even someone who is colorblind can read the traffic light due to the consistency in the position of the lights and what they mean. If every state had different colors and positions of lights, we would see a lot more accidents.

Design on the web is the same way, people expect certain things to be in a certain place on a website. If they are not there or are in a different place, they have to waste time trying to find them. Often people won’t bother with searching for things. They will just visit another site that is designed in a manner that they expect. Designing for usability is extremely important for eCommerce sites where one misstep leads visitors out of a buying process. While not quite as obvious as when a visitor has an item in a shopping cart, design missteps on corporate websites can be just as damaging, but not as easy to measure.

Designing for usability is not particularly difficult. You just need to be patient, know what to look for, do some testing, and be prepared to make constant improvements to your site. Redesigning your site can certainly help, but you will get the best results out of constant refinement.

We’ll examine what data to look at when redesigning your site in Website Usability Basics - Part 1 - Research.

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, usability, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

In Good vs. Bad B2B Websites, I introduced the idea of customer-centric sites: designing your site with your customer in mind instead of your company or organization. Why is customer-centric design important?

Your Customers will go somewhere else. There are plenty of websites and companies out there that do the same thing. If your customers can’t find what they are looking for on your site, they will quickly look elsewhere. According to a 2006 Online Transactions survey conducted for Tealeaf by Harris Interactive,

The top problems that would cause online consumers to immediately and permanently turn to a competitor’s website are:

• Incorrect information or lack of adequate information on the website (41%);
• Inability to complete the transaction due to an endless loop (36%);
• Difficulty navigating the website (37%); and
• Being automatically kicked off the page (25%).

Your Customers will tell their friends. With the proliferation of blogging, message boards and instant messaging, your customers are talking to each other. If one customer has a bad experience with your website, the others will quickly know. You can benefit from this communication and react instantly to your customers’ needs with a community on your own website.

InformationAge - Action/Reaction: Web 2.0: The fastest-growing websites are those geared towards interaction and community.

If you don’t, your competitors will. As competition on the web grows, companies are forced to improve their websites in order to stay in business. Websites used to be a required for the credibility of a company. Now they are often the only way a company communicates with its customers and potential customers.

Next Steps: The idea of customer-centric sites is tied intimately to the usability of a website. Here are some good sources of more information on website usability:

• User Interface Engineering
• Nielson Norman Group
• With Only ONE Website, Is Your Company Really Customer-Centric? (WebProNews.com)

Technorati Tags: customer-centric sites, usability, design, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

If you’d like more information on RSS feeds and how to use them in B2B here are some good sources:

• RSS definition from Wikipedia
• Introduction to RSS from WebReference (more technical)
• What’s RSS Marketing’s Future in B2B from MarketingProfs
• B2B Marketers Prefer Blogs, RSS, Podcasts Among Web 2.0 Tools from MarketingVox
• Using RSS Radars in B2B CRM from MarketingStudies
• RSS as a B2B Marketing Tool from B2B Marketing Trends

Technorati Tags: RSS, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

RSS, or Really Simple Syndication, is a feed which sends content from the website out to a feed reader. RSS provides an easy way to check hundreds of sites for updates in one place. Google and Bloglines both offer a web-based reader, and there are several software based readers including NewsGator.

More importantly, what good are RSS feeds to a B2B Website? Having RSS feeds for the content on your website allows your readers to subscribe to the feed and be alerted through their feed reader when you update content on your site. You can set the feed up to send out the entirety of your content or just snippets to entice visitors to read the rest on your site. Most mainstream sites send out their entire content, relying on visitors to come to their sites based upon their good information and functionality. RSS feeds also allow search engines and other web crawlers another way to access and index the content on your site which can increase your search engine optimization (SEO).

Many mainstream content management systems and blogging software already have RSS feed functionality, including the ability to customize how the feed looks and what content it sends out. There are also plugins, scripts and software available to create feeds from your web content. The more adventurous can also attempt to code their own feeds.

RSS feeds can also be used to take content from other sites and display them on your own (please make sure you are aware of any copyright restrictions). This requires software to turn the feed into code (HTML) which is displayable as part of your webpage. Many content websites already have this built in to widgets, badges and plugins they offer on their site (ex. Flickr, Twitter). For these sites, it is as simple as copying the code they give you into your own website code.

Once you have RSS feeds setup on your website, you can use RSS tracking sites, such as FeedBurner (just acquired by Google) to track how many people are subscribed to your feed, reading your feed content, and coming to your website from the feed. Without this type of specialized tracking, you can get ballpark statistics from looking at the visitors on your site. Many of the feed crawlers will announce themselves as such in their browser information (usually in the visitor information of analytics software). Google Analytics displays how many readers are subscribed and using the Google Reader. You will also be able to see visitors who come from web-based feed readers in the referral section of your analytics program.

RSS feeds for B2B websites allow your visitors to be constantly updated when you post new content on your website. SEO is improved by giving search engines and web crawlers a way to be updated when content is updated on your site. And you can improve the content on your own site by looking for badges, widgets and plugins that allow content from other sites to be displayed on your site (through RSS feeds).

Technorati Tags: RSS, web analytics, SEO, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

I just got back from a B2B trade show in Las Vegas, representing the publishing company where I work, to sell our online products to our B2B customers. As part of my research of each customer, I visited their website to see what their Internet presence looked like. I looked at about a dozen websites, which ran the gambit from pretty good to not very good at all (ok I’m being a little nice - some were pretty bad).

What was the difference between the good sites and the bad sites? Whether they are customer-centric or company-centric. Customer-centric sites recognize that B2B customers come to a website to do research for a buying decision or to find service or support for products they’ve already purchased. These sites provide white papers, in-depth product descriptions, training, service and support. Most importantly, it is easy for a customer to find exactly what they are looking for through good web design (usability) and search functionality.

As shown in our previously discussed research from American Business Media and the Washington Post, and confirmed in research from the Nielson Norman Group, B2B Decision Makers use the web to conduct research for buying decisions. According to the Nielson Norman Group research, B2B websites measured a mere 58% success rate, compared to the 66% for mainstream websites (this is success of the website visitors being able to accomplish their goals in visiting).

How do you become a customer-centric website or improve your customer experience?

Finding What They Need
Think about what your customers may be looking for when they come to your website. Taking a look at your analytics to see what keywords are used to enter the site from search engines and what paths visitors take through your website can give you valuable insight on what information you need to provide or make easier to find. If you have an internal search function, take a look at what visitors are searching for through it as well. Visitors often turn to a search when they cannot find what they’re looking for on the homepage or menus.

Organization
Organize the information on your website in a logical, easy-to-find manner. Place top level menu links on every single page of your website. These top level links should be descriptive and easy to understand (ex. Home, Products, Services, Help). Your homepage can contain a lot of information, but make sure there is enough white space for eyes to easily scan through it for important points. Product or Service pages should include everything needed to make a purchase decision, including a ballpark price and detailed specifications.

Purchasing
Once a visitor has made a decision to purchase (or to get the final information before purchase), it should be easy for them to find your contact information. Placing information on every Product and Service page (or even on every page of the website) and having a Contact page puts the information right in front of their fingers. Provide both a phone number and an email address since some customers are very busy and email is easier for them. If you do have products with fixed prices, consider an eCommerce solution with a shopping cart to allow your customers to make a purchase as easily as possible.

Support and Loyalty
Make your website a place your existing customers can use by providing information and training about your products, including white papers, spec sheets, webinars, podcasts and training videos. Adding community to your website through forums, comments and blogs can help you connect with your customers and provide valuable feedback through direct communication. Embrace any customers who post about problems by addressing their concerns in a fair manner. Use their insight to improve your product and your customers will feel more loyalty to your brand.

Good B2B websites focus on customer-centric designs to fulfill the needs of their customers who in turn will be more satisfied and loyal.

Technorati Tags: design, web design, content, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Video can have powerful impact for your business. You are probably aware of video on major consumer websites such as the New York Times, MSN, CNN or video sharing sites such as YouTube. Video that provides information to your customers helps establish credibility in for your knowledge and expertise.

Content
Information that is valuable to your customers, such as how-to, training, or news updates will be best received. Videos are more likely to be watched if they are short: 2-3 minutes at the most. If you have more information, split it up into separate videos. Quality of the video does not have to be perfect. Thanks to sites like YouTube, Internet viewers accept lower-quality pictures. Investing in a good mic and making sure the lighting is adequate are worthwhile.

Technical
Videos can be in many formats, including Windows Streaming Media (WMV), Quicktime (QT), avi, mpg, mpeg, and Flash Streaming (FLV). I prefer Flash because most people have the plugin already installed and it has good compression (quicker to download). For Windows, there are several relatively inexpensive video software packages to try: Adobe Premiere Elements, ROXIO Easy Media Creator and Ulead Video Studio. All new Macs come with iMovie. Hosting a popular video can eat up your alloted bandwidth so you may want to consider having video hosted elsewhere, such as YouTube, which has disadvantages as a consumer-oriented site, or Cache-fly.

Promotional
If you’ve spent the time and effort to produce a video (even if its only one), you’ll get the more response if you promote it in ways other than just posting it on your website. Consider an email or an eblast to your customers letting them know about it (check with anti-spam regulations). Ads linking to the video on your search engine marketing programs and B2B publications can also help with visibility. If you post the video on YouTube, it will be included in their searches (which are mostly consumer based).

Measurement
How do you tell if your video has been successful? Your analytics program should be able to tell you how many people have viewed the video (at least to start it). Tracking whether they have watched it all the way through is more difficult and requires more advanced (and expensive) software. Keep in mind that if you pre-download the video to allow for faster viewing, that may count a view for every load - not necessarily when people are clicking on it.

Once you’ve created a few, using video to increase your credibility and image can be very rewarding (and hopefully fun).

Technorati Tags: video, content, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

You have a spiffy website with engaging content organized in an easy-to-find manner. How do you know what is and isn’t working on your website? Where are your visitors coming from?

Analytics. Otherwise known as web statistics. There are three types of basic information for a website: page views, visits, and unique visitors. Page views are the number of web pages viewed on your website. Visits are the number times people visit the website. They can view multiple pages (page views) each visit. Unique visitors are the number of people who visit the website (usually as near as possible to ascertain).

There are a lot of packages out there: Omniture, Web Trends, Unica, Coremetrics, VisiStat, Google to name a few. The type of information they offer is wide ranging and so are the prices. How they gather stats can also be quite different, but there are two general camps: log-based, or tag-based.

Log-based packages:
Log-based packages take all of the logs from your web servers and crawl through them periodically to count up all the stats from your website. These logs usually contain all the traffic that comes to your website including search engine crawlers and bots. Search engine crawlers and bots are computers which visit and index your site, usually for purposes of adding you to the listings on their own website. This can be good for getting your website out in front of potential customers but it doesn’t tell you what the people who visit your site are doing. Most packages get around this by having a list of bots and crawlers to ignore in the stats - keeping this up to date can be a bit of work. Due to having to crawl through logs for stats, these stats packages usually cannot report ‘live’ data. They are usually at least a few hours behind.

Tag-based packages:
Tag-based packages work by placing a bit of code on all the pages on your site. When a visitor visits your site, this code activates and updates a count on your stats server. Most tag-based software is coded in such a way that automatically ignores all search engine and bot traffic. They may also ignore real traffic from people who have security software or a firewall that blocks the code - but this is usually a very small portion of your traffic. Many software providers have ways around this limitation by using tiny images instead. Tag-based packages can often deliver real-time stats.

Which to choose?
I’ve been using both types of packages for stats at the publishing company: Unica Web Analytics - log based and Google Analytics - tag based. My preference has been for the Google stats because we have a lot of difficulty keeping the search engine crawler and bots filter list up to date. Google analytics is easy to install and use and it is hosted so they keep the software up to date. The disadvantage to Google is that it is very difficult to get your stats out of it if you want to use them in another application for data mining purposes (we’re actually looking an Urchin which was bought by Google for this purpose). There are also some packages which use a combination of both methods. These can provide the advantages of both and negate most of the disadvantages, although they tend to be more expensive.

Technorati Tags: analytics, web analytics, web statistics, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Now that we have some design ideas, what content should you put on your website? How should it be organized? Again it helps to put yourself into your visitor’s shoes. What would you be looking for if you were a customer? It probably falls into one of three categories:

1. Information about a product or service (including cost and how to buy)
2. Contact information for someone at the company (sales, support, service, etc.)
3. Information about the company.

1. Information about a product or service (including cost and how to buy). Visitors are usually somewhere in the buying process (researching, actively buying) or are already a customer.

If they are in the buying process, they want information about a specific product or service or are looking to see what you offer. A link called ‘Products’ or ‘Services’ right on the homepage is a clear indicator to this type of information. You may even want to spotlight your best-selling products or those you want to market right on the homepage. Once visitors click on ‘Products’ or ‘Services’, they should be able to see a full list of your products or services without clicking further. The option to buy (either via eCommerce or email or phone) should be on every product and service page.

For visitors who are already your customers, they are probably looking for how-to information on use, service, or support. If you have any manuals, tutorials, or other information about your products, it is a good idea to have them on your website. The more information that customers can use to help themselves, the happier they’ll be and the less time and money you will have to spend on support.

2. Contact information for someone at the company (sales, support, service, etc.). Sometimes it just is easiest to talk to someone. Visitors look for contact information when they want to make a purchase, need more information, or need help. Make it easy for them to find your contact information. A link on all pages called ‘Contact Us’ or ‘Contact’ gets the point across, or you can have your basic contact information on all your pages. Customers who can find your contact information when they need to and can actually contact you will be happier - even if they have a problem. Happier customers are more likely to stay customers.

3. Information about the company. As part of the research process many buyers want to know more about your company - your history, your expertise and your contact information. While this usually seems like the most important information, it almost always is secondary to product or contact information. An ‘About Us’ page is a good place for general information and portion on the homepage for important information can help buyers understand how your company can help them.

The business to business (B2B) audience is busy trying to run their businesses. Time is valuable. Providing information that your customers are looking for and placing it where it is easy to find, will make your website a valuable resource and improve your customer loyalty.

Technorati Tags: content, SEO, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting

Now that we know that the Business to Business (B2B) audience is different than the Business to Consumer (B2C) audience, how do we design our website to cater to their needs?

The most important part of any design is to put yourself into the shoes of those who will be using your design. When you are at work and using the web (for work purposes), what are you doing? What sites do you visit? You are probably doing one of two things: browsing or searching. When you browse, you look at a handful of sites for updates on what is going on in your industry. Since your time is valuable, you expect to visit each site and be able to see if there is any important information just by looking at the homepage. If you are looking for something specific, you will probably start out at your favorite search engine (google, yahoo, msn, etc.). There may be a industry-specific search engine that works much better. On the search results page you click on links, click back to the search, try to refine your search by adding, removing or changing keywords, and hope you find the information you are looking for.

How do we incorporate these behaviors into our website design? There are few points worth highlighting:

1. Expect to see any important information just by looking at the homepage.
2. Browse to only a handful of favorite sites.
3. Industry-specific search engines.
4. Refining search keywords.

Let’s take these one at a time…

1. Expect to see any important information just by looking at the homepage. In both browsing and searching, you expect to find what you’re looking for either on the homepage or linked to from the homepage. The number of clicks to get to important information should be as small as possible. Scrolling down a long page is not as annoying as having to click through multiple pages, usually due to the time to load a webpage (even if small). Still, important information should be at the top of the page, arranged left to right, just as you read.

2. Browse to only a handful of favorite sites. Becoming one of these favorite sites is not easy. You need to have information that is of value, a lot of it, and it needs to be frequently updated. The type of information that busy business people find valuable and worth spending a few minutes on. It should be organized and preferably searchable. This takes a bit of a time commitment but doesn’t have to be difficult. The same types of things that help you gain rank in search engines, are also what are important to your visitors.

3. Industry-specific search engines. Being at the top of search engines such as Google, Yahoo! and MSN can be difficult for B2B companies. These search engines are usually used by consumers for consumer purposes and so their results are tuned to that type of search. B2B sites may be trumped by much larger and more popular consumer websites. Frequency of keywords, frequency of updating, number and importance of sites linking into the website all impact ranking in search engines. Take a look at any industry-specific search engines to see if you can submit your site to them and if they have any tips on how they formulate their search results. Trade links with other sites in your industry (preferably those favorites from #2). Encourage people to link to and share the content on your site by adding the ability to email your content, link to your content, and add your content to various social networks (digg, technorati, del.icio.us, etc).

4. Refining search keywords. B2B sites may have keywords which are used in the consumer industry by much larger and more popular websites. Using industry specific keywords in the content on your site will help make that content more findable. B2B sites can also stand out by purchasing sponsored links or ads in search results (usually at a fairly reasonable cost). Content you believe people are looking for, which you can tell from your web stats, should be easy to find - either on the home page or linked directly from in descriptive link text (not just click here).

Web design is not an easy process, but these tips should get you started in the right direction. Feel free to leave a comment or contact me with any questions.

Technorati Tags: web design, search engines, SEO, B2B, internet consulting, B2B internet consulting