Confabulations

When you get it right, the perfect website should be creative, usable for consumers and structured so that it can be optimised. What is the point of creating a fabulous, show stopping website full of flash and JavaScript, when it is impossible for search engines to crawl, consumers to see, and optimisers to market?  Every client who hires your company to design and optimise them a new website will expect the two teams to work together to create a finished product which does everything they asked in their brief. If the design/development team and the marketing team are not communicating, your site may well end up as a flop, with no traffic, no sales and no success.

This is especially important when it comes to ecommerce sites. People who use the internet to do their shopping have experience with different ecommerce sites, checkouts and navigation. I cannot tell you the number of times I have gone onto a website, put something in my basket, gone to the checkout and got my credit card out, only to abandon the transaction because the payment process was too complex. This problem is simple to remedy. Any SEO will be quick to tell you that a checkout process should be quick, and if it cannot be quick, then the stages should at least be listed so that shoppers can see they are progressing through the purchase.

The checkout is just one area where designers and marketers need to communicate more.  Another area of debate is product images. Product images need to be easily discernible from decorative images so that consumers know they can click on them and it will take them through to a more detailed product page. It is all very well designing a page so that the images float or overlap and look super nice, but if customers cannot use the page because it is all about looks and not about utility; you have not served your purpose of building a profitable site.

If you work for a digital agency, as a web designer, web developer or in SEO, think about how design, crawlability and usability go hand-in-hand. By looking at a website from a user’s perspective, you will be able to design a site that suits their needs as well as incorporating new technologies and special features.