Closing the gap

"Got a catalogue through the post the other day. It was huge and I couldn't seem to find the things I wanted, and even if I did then the pictures weren't there. Some of the pages were missing and I couldn't find the address of the company. The order form was a bit odd, too. Nothing about how much postage was, or dealing with returns. The weirdest thing was, the catalogue was from a well-known company. Not sure I'd even go into their shops now."

If that story was about a website rather than a catalogue, it'd be much more believable. It is so common to find websites that disappoint their visitors and owners that another example is hardly worth remarking. The flaws in them would not be tolerated in any other communications or sales channel, yet flaws impact heavily on the website's viability and perhaps affect the brand. The performance of a website boils down to two issues - poor usability and poor visibility.

Website performance

To get to grips with website performance first of all you need to know, in numbers, what you want from your website, and then measure how close you are now. Find out how to close the gap, take action and keep monitoring. Then, once you have fixed the problems, check out your competition and plan to keep ahead by enhancing performance. This is a cycle of plan-do-check-act just like any other management activity and just like other management activity it is a cycle that you need to keep going. We help you with the virtuous cycle by analysing performance and suggesting improvements based on the aims you have chosen for your website.

Surely the Internet is just another channel for communications, sales or distribution? Managing channels is the job of marketing, sales, customer support, and investor relations - those with a clear understanding of the customer. The website should be the same. The difficulty is that websites tend to be technically complex and hard for non-experts to understand let alone modify. Also, problems need to be dealt with holistically as they tend to interact. And online promotional techniques are different from the more familiar offline world. So there is some learning to do. Happily, under all the jargon are the same principles and methods.