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Your site should provide good task orientation, namely, highlighting tasks so they're easy to find and use. A visit to your website can among other things make a phone call unnecessary and save postage. Successful sites are focused on enabling actions that save time and money when done via the Web.
Bloated sites neglect the needs of their visitors. The resources for doing the desired tasks may be there, but finding them amid the overwhelmingly complex and slow-loading presentations may prove too challenging for first-time visitors to the site.
Or the bloated site may be poorly organized or hard to update so that keeping up with customers' needs is too costly, time consuming, or complex.
How can you know what visitors to your site will want to do? Your website visitors' needs are probably more basic than you think. Think about the questions you get from customers offline by phone, mail, or in person and how you could answer them online:
- When are you open (or when is your next appearance if you're a performer/author)?
- What is the nature of your business?
- Can I download a new menu, catalog, price list, or instruction manual?
- Can I get a price quote on your mailing list or be placed on your waiting list?
- Who's in charge of returns, new accounts, sales, or complaints?
- Where can I buy your products?
If you can't come up with a list like this for your business, keep a pad of paper next to your phone or ask your salespeople what they're hearing from customers.
Altogether, the user actions on your website give it a purpose a reason why someone would visit it just once or visit it once a week and they help you differentiate your business from your competitors.
Because people prefer to browse, search, and scan the contents of websites rather than read every single word, a successful site should be organized to give visitors a quick, structured overview. Using a hierarchical structure lets them get a little bit of information, and then they'll (hopefully!) dig a little deeper if they want more.
Think back to your middle school English class. Do you remember the Roman numeral headings, subheads, and topic sentences? Before you began writing that book report or essay, your teacher likely asked you to turn in an outline.
Stripped of its logos, colorful text treatments and images, a website should be a lot like an outline, an orderly presentation of what's the most important thing to know about the company it represents, what's the second most important, and so forth. A successful site keeps things in proportion with a hierarchical structure of most to least important that lets users get as little or as much information as they want from your site without becoming overwhelmed.
The textual content of your site has to be balanced with appropriate visual cues. Don't fall into the trap of giving your visitor too much text to read in a single page. On the other hand, you need to be mindful of the bloat that can be created by having too many images.
Communicating effectively on the Web is all about achieving the right balance. The navigation and graphical elements on your site should be sized and placed on your web pages to convey their relative importance to one another. Text should be concise and presented in easy-to-read short lines and paragraphs. A bloated website is full of heavy text blocks and lacks an easily discernible organization. The navigation can't be distinguished from the content, the content from the ads, the ads from the navigation.
If your site's outline isn't really clear and structurally sound, it's likely that your site is difficult to navigate. Every investment you make in fine-tuning your outline will likely pay off considerably with the praise and (hopefully) increased business you get from your site.
Important Points to Creating Good Website Hierarchy
- A visit to your website must make a phone call unnecessary and save postage.
- A successful site should be organized to give visitors a quick, structured overview.
- Don't fall into the trap of giving your visitor too much text to read in a single page.
- If your site's outline isn't really clear and structurally sound, it's likely that your site is difficult to navigate.
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