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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 – 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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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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