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B2B Website Usability Basics – Part 2 – Layout

Now that we’ve done some research on what your visitors are looking for and at on your website, we can take our first stab at our layout, or where things should go on the website. Here are a few basics:

  • The menu should be either across the top or down the left. A link to the homepage should be the top or left-most link. Menu items should be links to what people are looking for on your site. Examples: Products, Services, About, Contact. You should setup a hierachy that makes sense. All your products should be listed on the first Products page (or have links from there). All your services should be listed on the first Services page (or have links from there). You get the idea….
  • A search box, if you have one, should be in the upper right. There should be a text box to input your search terms and then a button right to the right of it which says ‘Search’.
  • Your most important and/or most frequently updated content should be in the upper left. Visitors scan left to right and then back to the left further down the page, continuing until they have to scroll down the page. Use the research gathered in Part 1 to select the items that are most important and lay them out left to right, then down the page as if you are reading (you probably find yourself scanning down pages in this same manner on other sites). To borrow a term from print newspapers, items above the fold (or what is immediately viewable without scrolling) should be your most important content, products or services.
  • Provide text links at the bottom of each page to your highest level or most important links to make them easy to find.
  • White space should be incorporated to break up text and make it easy for visitors to scan your website for what they are looking for.
  • Minimize movement of pictures, ads and movies – they are distracting and annoying to visitors who are looking at your site.

Once you put your layout into place, you are ready for B2B Website Usability Basics – Part 3 – Testing.

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B2B Website Usability Basics – Part 1 – Research

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

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B2B Website Usability Basics – Introduction

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.

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