Mom always stressed how important first impressions are….

What does your home page say about you or your company? Chances are, if it’s like many Web sites out there, very little. Many companies realize that Web sites are a prime marketing channel for their business, but they forget that other people, including potential customers don’t eat, drink, breathe and sleep their products. This means that their Web site front page ends up being a showcase for whatever company project has the focus at the moment.
Some of the more common elements of a company home page are:
•    Products for sale
•    News and Press Releases
•    Events and Announcements
•    Navigation
•    Search
What’s missing from many home pages is a clear and concise description of the company. If your customers can’t figure out what you’re trying to sell or do for them right away they might just give up and leave immediately.
What About Existing Customers?
You might be asking, “But our existing customers already know who we are and what we do.” While that is probably true, your Web site should be a ready resource for attracting new customers as well as retaining existing ones.
But if the new customers aren’t really sure what you offer, they might leave for a firm that is more clear.
What you should aim for is a balance between providing the tools returning customers crave with the information that new customers need to make the decision to go with your company. This can be just a sentence or two, with links to more if they need or want it. Leaving this out may satisfy one department’s need for one more sentence about their product, but risks alienating new customers before they’ve even gotten to that product.

1. Make a site with a clear hierarchy and text links. Every page should be reachable from at least one static text link.
2. Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages.
3. Create a useful, information-rich site, and write pages that clearly and accurately describe your content.
4. Think about the words users would type to find your pages, and make sure that your site actually includes those words within it.
5. Try to use text instead of images to display important names, content, or links. The Google crawler doesn’t recognize text contained in images.
6. Make sure that your TITLE tags and ALT attributes are descriptive and accurate.
7. Check for broken links and correct HTML.
8. If you decide to use dynamic pages (i.e., the URL contains a “?” character), be aware that not every search engine spider crawls dynamic pages as well as static pages. It helps to keep the parameters short and the number of them few.
9. Keep the links on a given page to a reasonable number (fewer than 100).

If your website is difficult to use, visitors will leave. If your homepage fails to clearly state what your company offers and what visitors can do on the site, they will leave. If users get lost on your website, they will leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer their high-level questions, they will leave.

Clear Enough?

For brochureware sites, usability could be the lost sales lead of the year.

The first law of e-commerce is that if users cannot find the product, they cannot buy it either.

For intranets, usability is a matter of employee productivity. Time users waste being lost on your intranet or pondering difficult instructions is money you waste by paying them to be at work without getting work done.

Is it time for a site redesign?