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Build a Better Web Site

by Ed Grenda, President
Castle Island Co.

(C) Copyright Castle Island Co., All Rights Reserved.


Have you looked at every single rapid prototyping web site?
We have. Acerbic, highly-opinionated, mean-spirited advice,
but someone has to do it. At least it's free.

[A bowdlerized, humor-free, version of this article appeared in
the March, 2001 issue of TCT Magazine.]


It’s often said that your web page is the front door to your business. That’s fundamentally true for many businesses these days, especially those dealing in products or services that are related in some way to information. Then, does it make good sense to lock potential customers out? I recently looked carefully at several hundred web sites in the rapid prototyping service bureau industry while assembling an extensive directory. My conclusion is that a lot of companies are placing serious impediments in front of any customer that tries to do business with them or get information through their web sites. I’m sure that this industry isn’t the only guilty one - probably most are - it’s just that the data I gathered were for a specific purpose. It’s likely that the lessons learned would apply more widely than to just this group of companies.

There’s a reason that business correspondence, print publications and other media that preceded the web have developed customary formalities: It saves time. By placing data in a commonly or formally agreed upon sequence and location, and using a common syntax, we meet the expectations of a reader or any other receiver of a communication. This greatly aids the receiver’s ability to understand the precise intent of the communication. That’s why we mutually agree upon dictionary spellings for words, and that’s why a radio transmitter can successfully send a signal to a radio receiver.

On the Internet, however, all bets are off and you’re often on your own in trying to figure out how to pick the signal out of the noise. The prevailing attitude of web designers is that a new medium need not conform to old standards. That’s stupid. Any new medium - even a web page - should still be coherent and easy to use. A new medium doesn’t require the abandonment of what already works.

Among the numerous obstacles placed in front of sales prospects on web pages are:

I’m aware that some of what I say below might be relieved by faster communication speeds, and in some cases organizations may already have high speed links available. Nevertheless, if the desire is to reach as wide an audience as possible and to convey precise information, an attitude must prevail which takes into account the communication channel’s existing capabilities. Today and for the reasonably foreseeable future that means computers hung on medium speed modems connected to copper wires. Keep in mind that even organizations that have faster links will have personnel that will be researching problems and gathering data from other locations such as home, in hotels or places where they may not have access to a high speed link.

I am also aware that I am not the most sophisticated web user nor have I an optimal complement of technical equipment. Frankly, I’ve had complaints. But if you can’t get a web page to me, or if I can’t figure out how to reach you or what you do, you’re in big trouble. That’s because I have the patience and the moral perspicacity of a saint. Many other people don’t have these characteristics, I have been told. They will be inclined to bag their contact with you and simply move to the next site where they can figure out what it says. They will take their business elsewhere and you will starve.

Your web site should:

 

BUTN Caution: Slow Aesthetics Ahead

Many web designers have placed the last item first and thereby constructed monuments to their fine taste and artistic abilities at your obvious great expense. Their reputations are burnished among their peers and they can show the next rube how they made your web site do tricks and thereby obtain even more money for food of which they should not be allowed to partake. These people are lower on the great scale of life than echinoderms or the flat worms, and in some cases even below the telemarketers. Ask yourself what questions a prospect is trying to answer by going to your web site and in what order he or she would like them answered. Provide those answers in that order on your opening page. Unless you are the MOMA or some such thing, these people are not coming to your web page for an aesthetic experience; they are there to get information to solve a problem. If the problem becomes getting the information off your page, they’ll go elsewhere immediately.

 

BUTN Faster Than a Speeding Bullet

Your opening page should load as quickly as possible. In today’s world, that means limiting the use and size of graphics, or making larger graphics an optional click away from the main information stream. Requiring someone to fill out a form, treating them to a multi-media extravaganza - or worse yet - a multi media extravaganza that requires a special plug-in, will cause them to bolt. Simply because it’s possible to send music, video and other forms of expression over the web, does not mean that there is a practical reason to do so in a business communication.

No graphic should be greater than about 20K in size. Animated graphics are great - just don’t use them on a business site; they are a complete waste of resources. The number of graphics should be limited, as well. Each picture element requires a separate 2 way communication between the server and the client computer and the overhead in doing that runs up the time for your precious sales message to appear.

Think about your web page as though it were a print or TV ad. You would be very aware that you have to catch a customer’s eye quickly in those media and your approach would be to find a way to do that successfully. Well, your web page is an ad too. You don’t experience the high distribution costs of other media, but that doesn’t mean that your audience hasn’t been trained to be impatient by seeing millions of ads throughout their entire lives, or that successful communication isn’t valuable to you. The novelty of the web won’t substitute for a slowly loading web page because the web is no longer a novelty.

 

BUTN Complete and Organized

What your opening page says is important. It must tell who you are, what exactly you do and how to reach you. It must form the point of the triangle that is the organization chart of your web site. It is astonishing that many home pages don’t perform this function at all, but allow the potential customer to try figure these things out by wandering the site basically at random. A correctly designed product shouldn’t need an operating manual; it should teach you how to use itself. In an analogous way, reliance on a site map for organization on your web site is a cop-out. You are simply throwing the ball to the prospect and telling him or her to figure it out. Make the organization of the site dead obvious and provide a map only as a back up or for serious data mining. Your opening page should be as clear and concise as your company’s mission statement. (That could be big trouble for some of us, come to think.)

 

BUTN You Might As Well Use Latin

Another thing that can significantly increase page loading time is the use of Java and other scripting language routines. These should be completely avoided, except for the simplest functions. Sorry Sun Microsystems - except for simple applications like rollovers, they don’t work. The vast majority of crashes, memory problems and other serious time wasters that I experienced - and I experienced a lot - were due to scripting problems of one kind or another.

Java is designed to be a universal, software-based processor that can execute program routines while running on any computing platform. This is a laudable goal which I heartily endorse. Let me know when it works. What seems to be the case at present, is that software incompatibility, language inconsistency, or just plain missing code or communication problems will often hang a routine. The more complicated the routine, the more likely it is to hang. A sophisticated surfer can sometimes recover from this, but I’ve had situations that required a cold boot. In almost all cases the routines are there to run non-essential or aesthetic features. To see some cute or tricky programming, the prospect gets to waste several minutes, possibly several times. You need a very good reason to do scripting. Cute and/or tricky isn’t sufficient. Never incorporate significant scripting on the opening page. If you crash the prospect’s computer, they will be very reluctant to burn off an additional five minutes on another attempt to access your site because they can so easily go elsewhere.

 

BUTN Frames Box You In

Designers are getting better at using frames, but still have a way to go because they’re an inherently awkward device. An acceptable use of frames is to provide the now customary left hand or top of screen navigation area as a constant over multiple pages. The other acceptable use is to not use frames at all. Make sure all scroll bars are suppressed and that they remain suppressed with all browsers and screen display settings. Navigation areas should be kept small enough and varied from page to page to not require scroll bars. Usually the scroll bars won’t scroll anyway and just take up precious, better used otherwise, screen real estate. Frames can make for disorderly printing and funny things sometimes happen with “back” and “forward” buttons. Frames also force the user to do a lot of extra clicking to make sure that control is in the part of the picture of interest. It’s very annoying and can be quite confusing.

While frames are not specifically forbidden and won’t slow loading the page much, make certain they work flawlessly under all conditions before allowing them.

 

BUTN Are You Trying to Keep Customers Away?

Make sure that your customer can reach you instantly from any point on your site. Contact information should be off screen, but instantly available with one click. This simulates a brochure; you can always flip a brochure over or look at the bottom of the page to find out where to call or write. The prospect is not going to read the entire site and he or she should find it easy to reach you the instant the urge to buy or get more information is upon him or her.

Contact information means: the company name, street address and/or POB, city, state, postal code, country, telephone, fax and email - in this order. It doesn’t mean a random sub-set of these items, or an assumption on your part that the customer should contact you by your preferred means. Why would you put less contact information on your web site than on your company letterhead? Why would you make the order roughly backwards? Your contact information should be presented someplace on the contact page in simple text format within the HTML code so that it can be selected, cut and pasted for convenience. In many cases, designers combine the company’s logo with the contact information and put that into a graphic. If a prospect wants to send you a letter, or place your address into another digital file for future reference he or she will have to copy your address out by hand or re-type it. They probably won’t do it.

Do not leave out or hide your email address. Your prospect has his or her personal hands on his or her personal computer at that very instant. Why not let them communicate with you using it? For example, unlike the IRS, the most successful businesses do not generally have unlisted phone numbers. Do not force the prospect to use your often shabby form to contact you by email from your page. By forcing the prospect to use your form, you are cramping the individual’s style and presenting him or her with an unfamiliar and usually quirky interface. Why not simply provide a mailto link which will call up their familiar email fill-out form?

 

BUTN The Grenda-Compliant Web Site

Here is a check list which you may refer to in order to see if your web site is Grenda-Compliant. I would suggest you make a hard copy of this list and force it down your web designer’s throat using a stout piece of lumber. A Grenda-Compliant web site loads fast, has all the data that is required by the prospect to answer his or her specific needs, closes the sale, and crushes the competition like a freight locomotive dropped from the Space Shuttle. It can be understood by me and it will not annoy and frustrate me. It will not make me cry.

Speed

Content

Graphics

Scripting Languages

There will be great reluctance on the part of web designers to comply with these rules. They will tell you that these rules are nonsense, but these people are children of Satan. Consider that by using these rules you will have a web site that operates like a well-oiled machine and which is much easier, and therefore less expensive, to write. You’re paying for it - it’s up to you. You choose: beautiful, expensive and useless, or good-looking, cheap and effective.

mailto:EdGrenda@aol.com

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(C) Copyright Castle Island Co., All Rights Reserved.
REV 2c - - - 1/4/02; 11/20/03