NextStage's CRO explains how to keep current visitors happy while making your site more attractive.
My recent Websites: You've Only Got 3 Seconds column got a great deal of response, so first my thanks to all the readers, bloggers, designers and students who included it in their must reads. Quite a few readers requested the bibliography mentioned at the end of the article, and some responses to it gave me a chuckle ("Those were science articles, Joseph. Do you have anything on marketing?").
Bad Joseph! No cake!
One reader, Jan Limpach of Cleveland-based search engine optimization firm Keyphrase-Marketing, emailed me with some confusion. He followed the links to NextStage Evolution's website and was...uh...unimpressed. Was this the site used by the company behind those incredible articles?
"Well, uh...yeah," I said, my head hung in shame. The truth is I rarely look at NextStage's websites. What I do look at is our numbers and how they change.
NextStage Evolution primarily does research in how people respond to information. When I founded NextStage, I vowed that nothing would "crawl out of our labs" (a phrase NextStage partner FindMeFaster loves to use when introducing us to clients) until it had been real-world tested. Those real-world tests are done on our own sites and our research sites worldwide. NextStage consultants can give clients extremely specific suggestions with great confidence because we test our suggestions on ourselves rather than test them on our clients. Remember that I have a background in anthropology? This is the anthropologist's "participant-observation" methodology applied to the web.
So I let our web designer know when some new content is required and don't pay much attention beyond that until I’m told how the numbers changed. In fact and as I wrote Jan, my main interaction with the NextStage sites is basically "Make sure the print is large enough and dark enough for me to read".
Well, Jan caught me.
Good consulting
Jan wrote that NextStage had violated Janism #124, "If all is bold, then none is bold!" So I took Jan's suggestion and had a test page made up that wasn't bold. Jan had several suggestions, and matching his suggestions to our known audience is the basis of this column. I'm dedicating this column to Jan because the suggestions were sound, thoughtful and well-reasoned.
Indicating where problems exist and offering solutions is what good consulting is all about. With a little extra information (which Jan didn't have access to), understanding which to implement and why will, I think, be helpful to readers.
To boldly go without
One thing we always advise clients who are redesigning their website is to let regular visitors know a redesign is taking place. Regular visitors who are on your site one day then find themselves on a completely redesigned site the next -- new navigation, new menu items, new action items, new options and all the old ones gone -- get debranded.
A recent example of this was on the Emetrics Summit home page. The Emetrics Summit folks took this NextStage suggestion and placed the message "Stay tuned for a measured, deliberate change to our website in X days" on their homepage. Each day the "X" was updated allowing regular visitors to know when the change would occur.
This kept visitors coming back to see the changes. It also alerted regular visitors so there wouldn't be any unpleasant surprises. NextStage received emails about Emetrics Summit's use of that suggestion, indicating people paid attention and people came back.
Thing two is to always give regular visitors a "way back" to what they've known. I use language acquisition as an example of providing a way back.
It's very easy to learn a first language, not so easy to learn a second. Unless, of course, you do two basic things. First give them a good reason to learn the new language. Second, let them speak the old language when they get too frustrated to speak the new language.