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Customer-Centric Sites

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:

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B2B RSS Resources

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

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RSS for B2B Websites

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).

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