When you’re looking at designing your website, don’t just broad brush stroke a description and leave it up to some whiz-kid to figure it out. They will, and you’ll be stuck with a high-tech, gee-whiz site that does some of what you need, a lot of things you don’t need, and frustrates and confuses the heck out of your visitors.
And your techie will be totally baffled. He won’t have a clue as to why people have a problem navigating through his space age way cool site. I mean, don’t they know those are links? Why do we need to turn the underlines on? It’s so much more Euro this way!
You may have a Flash presentation that tells nothing, colored backgrounds with lots of italics, chopped up sales copy to fit some abstract design. How do I know these things?
In all of my time marketing online, beginning in 1993 with my first ads on Compuserv, I have worked with over 100 webdesigners… and only three were intuitive at all! Most would enthusiastically nod their head and say they got it, then come back in a few days with something totally different. The intuitive ones seem to come back with everything I originally ask for, AND think beyond what I imagined to create even more opportunities to market visitors and get sales.
What’s important is that you drive the ship. You take the time to find those sites you think are intuitive, interesting, and easy to navigate around. Then outline exactly what you want on each page, find a designer who has a track record with some successful sites, and give it a go. If he’s the right one, what you’ll get back is everything you wanted and more. If not… next!
