7 key benchmarks for assessing
your website.
1. Brand Positioning
Have you identified and articulated your key benefit(s)?
The golden rule of marketing is that benefits sell your product – not features. Features describe the characteristics of your product while benefits describe what the product does for the buyer. For example, “Our trains reach a top speed of 200 MPH” is a feature. “We get you there faster” is a benefit.
Have you identified your target audience(s)
When answering this question, do your best to identify quantifiable data like age, sex, income level and geographical location. You should also make some assumptions as to a typical decision-making process, their online habits and most importantly, the pain points that might attract users to your site. You may have more than one audience target and should create a profile for each.
Do you have a clear call to action?
A website is generally either trying to sell something on the spot or get the user engaged in a sales process by having them call or contact the company. Ensure you’re clear on what your primary call to action is and have it prominently displayed near the top of the page so that no scrolling is required. If there is a secondary call to action (i.e. “Sign up for our Newsletter”) give it appropriate emphasis.
2. Navigation and Architecture
Does your main navigation have more than 6-7 headings?
Current best practices indicate that there should be no more than 6 or 7 main headings on your website and they should be clear categories that leave no room for ambiguity. If you have more than one target audience, your main headings should address these different audience’s distinct needs.
Having fewer headings allows people to quickly orientate to your website. Any other pages on the site should be grouped under the main heading in a clear hierarchy. This most efficient way to do this is to use drop down menus or, if appropriate, sub navigation may be displayed once one of the top category landing pages has been selected.
Are there alternate ways of navigating the site using callouts
Individuals respond to information differently so, in addition to the structured navigation, you should provide visual and text prompts that focus on specific site features that you want to emphasize. For instance, if you determine that case studies or testimonials work well for your product, feature an illustrative callout box on your home page that takes users straight to the information you want them to see most.
3. Headlines and Content
Is your content simple, succinct and scan-able
Generally people scan the content of web pages, so give them cues that allow them to process information quickly. Avoid long blocks of uninterrupted text and use subheadings or bullet points wherever possible.
Headlines should clearly describe the content of the page
Ensure visitors can get a good grasp of your company and or product benefits if they only read the headlines. Your headline can differ from the page title, for instance, Our Team could read, “A team of top industry professionals”.
4. Visual Design
Does your site have a visual theme to give your message depth and consistency?
When used properly, photos and illustrations can add enormous depth to a website. The right image creates a visual anchor that reinforces the benefit of your product or service. When settling on a set of visual assets, ensure there is consistency of style, quality and tone, yet enough variety so that each page appears fresh and relevant.
Does the design appear busy or cluttered?
The purpose of design is to make information more appealing and coherent. While decorative details may have their place if they support an overall visual theme, you should eliminate any graphical element that doesn’t serve a clear purpose.
Consider how the page will appear in different browsers and screen sizes
Current best practices suggest designing for a screen resolution of 1024 x 768 and constraining your contents width, while leaving the height of the page unconstrained to allow for differences in text size and other variables. Page banners, headlines and navigational elements should all be above the scroll line cutoff.
5. Development
Does your site utilize the latest web standards?
Your site should utilize CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) to ensure site structure, content and layout are independent of one another, allowing for easy updates. This also implies that your navigational elements should be hyper text based as opposed to image based (if you can select words in your navigation, it is text based). While flash has its place, building entire websites in flash is inherently limiting and should be done only after careful consideration.
In addition, you should avoid frames and use tables only when necessary. Both of these approaches are somewhat antiquated and don’t effectively make use of the latest web browser technology.
Has the design has been fully checked for cross-browser compatibility?
The main browsers to test on are Internet Explorer 7 and 8, Firefox, Apple’s Safari and Google’s Chrome. Internet Explorer 6 doesn’t support many current standards and is now nearly 10 years old so we have recently followed Google and other industry leaders in dropping support. Unfortunately some people are still using it – make sure you’re not one of them!
Are you able to update articles and news items yourself?
You should have a section of your site for news updates articles or blog posts. This will help your site appear fresh and up to date (as well as positively influence search engine rankings). There should be an easy way for you to manage it yourself without having to call a technical person with a web based content management system (CMS).
6. Search Engine Optimization
Does your site appear on Google’s first page for relevant keywords?
Depending on your industry, it’s unrealistic to expect your business to appear on Google’s first page for a popular general search term, such as “Real Estate Agent”. However, you should be in the running once the term is qualified by your physical location, for instance: Real Estate Agent Toronto.
Unless you’re already receiving a lot of inbound links from other sites, you’ll probably need to make specific efforts to improve your search ranking. These can include optimizing your page titles and text to include the most relevant keywords to your business, optimizing site code and building inbound links to your page.
7. Analytics
Is there is a clear plan for monitoring and improving site performance?
The real test of how your website is performing lies in the numbers. A comprehensive analytics package such as Google’s free version offers a wealth of data to help you make decisions about how to improve your website.
Combined with split testing, which allows you to show different versions of a page to your audience and test which performs best, analytics offers an opportunity to gather valuable business intelligence and make your site as good as it can be.
Want to have your website assessed by Jar Creative? Contact Us
About the Author:
Jeremy Robinson is the President and Creative Director at Jar Creative, a Toronto based Digital Marketing Agency. An internet pioneer with over 10 years in digital design, he has extensive experience working with International brands on high level marketing and brand initiatives.
