Three quick tips to improve your website
A lot of development work involves medium and long-term projects: improving, then improving again. But here are three quick tips that you can do this week to check your website.
Get your mum’s help with your site
Get your mum (or dad) to try and buy one of your products from your website. Even better: use your mother-in-law as the human guinea pig. Give her a simple task, like finding a specific product, then shut up. Sit behind her and listen while she describes what she is doing. DO NOT HELP HER AT ANY STAGE.
Phone a friend
Visit a friend or neighbour who is still using dial-up internet, like 50% of Kiwis. Try and use your own site on dial-up. Unless you are selling a high-end B2B enterprise-level gizmo, then do not assume your customers have broadband.
Shop your rivals
Visit a rival’s website and buy something. Write down what was good, easy, better than your site — and what was hard, bad, worse than your site. Bite your lip and see the job right through to purchase and get the product delivered to your home. See what the steps were, and what emails and other communication you get during and after the sale. This will give you a lot of insight into their dispatch and delivery process.
You can then choose between:
- Burning their inferior product in an act of spiritual cleansing; or
- Selling it on again in your own shop; or
- Returning it and testing their returns process
The good news is that if you do anything at all to improve your website this week, you are already at the front of the pack. Doing anything beats doing nothing!
Six comments
Thanks for that, Aimee.
Our client mix is roughly 50/50 e-commerce sites and lead-generation sites. There is also a small group that doesn’t neatly fit into either category.
We will make sure that one of the March newsletters is aimed at non-product website owners.
If you have any particular questions then do please contact me or any or our team.
I am john_at_leftclick.com
What a great idea. I like the mother-in-law test. We sell foreign language classes (and not tangible products). As Aimee pointed out, it can be a bit more challenging to convey the message. Maybe in March you can cover “how to convey the customer experience”.
Loving your little illustrations aye - they rock! 50% of kiwis using dailup? Where did you get that from?
The figure is taken from stats.govt.nz (March 2007)
Quote: “analog [DIALUP] is still the predominant connection technology with 50.5 percent of total subscribers”
Hi Alan, I am still enjoying and learning from your newsletters as well as directing new business start up clients to the site. Kindest regards Jill
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Hi there
I find you newsletters very interesting even though they do not specifically apply to us as we sell services rather than products.
Do you or are you considering have tips/newsletters especially for websites that do not sell products?
If not, can you recommend someone who does?