Your homepage is the first encounter many customers have with your business. How important is it to make a good first impression?

75% of web users admit to making judgments about the credibility of an organization based on the design of its web site. – Source: Stanford Guidelines for Web Credibility, Persuasive Technology Lab. Stanford University, 2003

68% of U.S. online shoppers agree that they will distrust a site that doesn’t have a professional appearance. – Source: eMarketer, 2006

83% of businesses use the Internet to research and find potential vendors. – Source: Enquiro: Business to Business Survey 2007.

An effective home page is the first step to conversion. Take this quick audit of your home page to determine whether you could improve your home page’s effectiveness.

1. Does your homepage have a clear goal?

The overall goal of your website is to sell your product or service, but the goal of your homepage might be to entice clients to enter the site. The home page needs to give the user a reason to continue. It is the gateway to the rest of your website. Before looking at anything else, what is the goal of your home page? A designer must be intimately familiar with your goals in order to create an effective design. Your content and design should combine to support that goal.

For example, if you provide a moving service for companies, your home page goal could be “to get a business owner to call for an estimate”. If so, you need to provide on the page that allows a customer to make the decision to call you or at least explore your site. You might want to list the other services you provide which make you a one-stop shop for moving such as: warehousing and storage, rentals, office moves, or employee relocation? In the example below, the home page provides not one, but two, incentives to get in touch: “Live Online Support” and “Request an Estimate”.

If you are a custom home design firm, perhaps your goal is “to attract clients who share our design sensibilities” because you want to establish a reputation for modernist home projects. Therefore, your home page needs less information, but the design should be clean, minimalist, and reflect a modernist aesthetic while showcasing some of your projects. It’s unlikely anyone will buy a home right off the website, so a call-to-action would encourage clients to call you up and start a dialogue.

2. Can users find what they expect to find?

There are some basic components that should be instantly identifiable and easy to find. Users need assurance that they will be able to find their way around the site. Think about where you would expect to find elements such as:

• Your logo and tag line
• Navigation menus
• Contact information
• Site search

3. Is there a reason for every design element on your homepage?

Minimize clutter and make it easy for users to discern the goal of your homepage. Widgets, fancy navigation, or animated images may be eye-catching, but unless they contribute to the overall functionality of the homepage and its goal, all they do is distract. Distraction makes it harder for users to find what they need, whether it’s information or navigation.

4. Does your homepage layout prioritize important content?

Not all content on a homepage is created equal. One way a good design can prioritize content is through layout – the position of text or design elements. If you had to prioritize the content on your home page, what would that hierarchy look like? Now look at where that content is positioned on your page.

Studies have shown that we scan content according to an F-shape. Our eyes begin at the top left of a page, then to the right, then down. Are the most important messages on your website laid out to take advantage of the F-shape?

Source: Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox, April 17, 2006: F-Shaped Pattern For Reading Web Content

5. Do you highlight important content?

Point 4 explains how content can be prioritized through correct positioning on a page. But within each area of a page, you may want to highlight specific content – which can be text or graphical elements. To make important elements really pop out, you can employ numerous tactics:

• Whitespace: isolates the content or graphical element to make it stand out more
• Size: a larger image or font will cue the user that this information matters more
• Contrast: a contrasting colour or font differentiates an element from its surroundings. There is a reason why BUY NOW buttons are always high contrast.

6. Does important information look like an ad?

We are so inundated with online ads that our brains now filter out content that displays like ads, no matter how important the information. If there are important messages or call-to-actions, avoid design elements or positioning that could make them look like ads. In a now-classic experiment, users were asked to find the population of the USA from the US Census Bureau website. Even though this information was located prominently in big red fonts on the top right of the page, only 14% of visitors read and found the information.

7.  Page response times matter

A 2006 study by Akamai and JupiterResearch identified the ‘4 Second Threshold’ as the average amount of time that an online shopper is willing to wait for a web page to render. It is now 2011. Computers are faster, networks are faster, and consumers are even more demanding when it comes to page response time. The homepage is the first contact customers have with your company. A fast-loading clean, crisp design will do more for your brand than a slow, content-heavy page. Go back to Point 3 – clutter. Clutter not only deters due to visual confusion, it can slow down page performance.

How I used the online power of Twitter to resolve a customer service issue in 5 minutes, which could not be dealt with after an hour on the phone.

We`ve all been there, listening to mind-numbing hold music for hours on end, being told by an automated voice over and over that “we are currently experiencing longer than usual wait times, your call is important to us and we will answer your call as soon as possible”. Or even worse: “all of our operators are currently busy, please call back later.”

I’m sure you’ll agree, these phrases are some of the most rage inducing out there, and this rage is multiplied further when your call is answered by:

a) somebody who you struggle to understand

b) somebody who has clearly had very limited training and does not have the power to deal with your issue,

or my personal favourite:

c) somebody who is situated on the other side of the world and has been awake for 18 hours answering calls, resulting in their level of concern for your particular situation the same as fighting a losing battle with a small insignificant insect crawling across their desk, which in some cases reflects the way in which you are spoken to.

Now I, like many others, am looking for more from a vendor in the way of customer service. I want to be dealt with in a prompt and efficient manner. I want to be in contact with somebody who can empathise with my issue. Someone who is willing to show some understanding and deal with my problem accordingly and not make me feel like ‘just another caller’.

This brings me to a recent experience of mine with a company that demonstrates each end of the customer service spectrum perfectly, and really started me thinking about the future of customer service as a whole. Now this company is a well known telephone provider here in Canada, and in the interest of anonymity I will refer to them as ‘Dog and Bone.’ (Cockney rhyming slang for ‘phones’ for my non-English audience.)

About a month ago, I decided the time had come for me to purchase a new mobile phone. It was brought to my attention that through years of loyalty to my current provider, I had built up a substantial amount of  ‘Dog and Bone’ dollars, a currency with which I could purchase my new phone. So I wandered down to my local retail outlet, picked out a phone and tried to buy it. Unfortunately, it was not in stock, but would be three days later.

“Not to worry,” I thought, “I’ve waited three years, three days is insignificant to me.” However, I was told that this particular day was the last with which I could use my Dog and Bone dollars without incurring a $25 (real money) charge for the privilege, but as my case was an exception I of course would bring this to someone’s attention upon my return and would avoid the charge.
Three days later I returned, collected my new phone and was again assured that I would not be charged. I was a happy customer.

As you can guess the story doesn’t end there. As I checked my bill in January, to my dismay, I found that I had been charged the said $25. As a man of principal (at least when it applies to me losing money) I decided that a phone call was in order. So I picked up the dog and bone and gave ‘Dog and Bone’ a call (clever, I know) to gain a refund.After around 10 minutes of listening to Lulu’s greatest hits supported by the album titled  ‘The most annoying synth string orchestra compilation in the world ever’, I was greeted by a very pleasant gentleman who thanked me for choosing ‘Dog and Bone’, for which I assured him he was very welcome.

So, with all pleasantries aside I told my story. I was told that, unfortunately, this was a mandatory charge for all customers and we will not be able to refund it. At this point the tone of the conversation turned slightly sour, but despite my pleadings I hit a brick wall, as I didn’t have evidence to substantiate my claim that the retail attendant had told me that I would not be charged. It was now clear to me that my perception of this being a customer service issue was flawed and that I was in fact being tried in a court of law, and my alibi was not standing up to scrutiny.

Realising that this particular prosecutor was unable to help me, I decided to go higher to gain satisfaction, and requested to speak with a manager. Unfortunately, after another 10 minutes on hold, a total of 45 minutes in total, I had to return to work and swallow my pride, begrudgingly admitting defeat and accepting that I would have to pay up.

Now I use social media on a day to day basis and view Twitter as a great way to meet new people, both for business purposes and on a personal level. From time to time, I will also use Twitter to express my opinions on different issues. If I enjoy something, then I will share my joy with my Twitter followers and give ‘props’ to the relevant party. In this case, however, I was not feeling overly joyous about the fact that I had wasted my lunch hour on a futile phone call. With this in mind, I posted the following tweet.

“I moved to Canada 2 years ago, and signed up with @dogandbone immediately, ever since they have been the bane of my life! Anybody else had any problems?”

I was looking to communicate my dissatisfaction, while at the same time hoping to engage one of my followers into a conversation, but the first correspondence I received was from @dogandbone, asking for more details on my problem.

Within 10 minutes, I had messaged the Dog and Bone Twitter rep the details, and they had assured me that I would receive a phone call within 24 hours to resolve the issue. Sure enough, less than a day later, I received a voicemail, apologising for the inconvenience, and informing me that the $25 fee been fully refunded.

Now obviously this pleased me greatly. From the despair of thinking I would never see my money again, I had achieved my goal! But it got me thinking: if I had utilised social media originally, whether it be Twitter or Facebook, then I would probably have resolved my issue much quicker and with much less stress!

So maybe the era of the call centre is over. Social media provides a completely transparent medium of communicating your issue for the world to see. No more private phone calls; just clear tweets about your problem, and clear responses from the business in question. Gone are the days of threatening to go to the press, the press is just a medium to communicate with the general public, and we can now communicate with the general public at the click of a button at any time! Companies like “dog and bone’ are no longer in a position to hide bad reviews and customer complaints, and the transparency of the internet dictates that they either treat customers fairly and with respect, or face the wrath of the social media generation, who have the power to spread bad publicity faster than you can say, “thank you for waiting, we appreciate your call”.

Collecting analytics data about your site visitors is a good thing. The theory behind collecting information is that if you have some sensible data, you can better plan when executing business objectives. But, like most good things, there’s a catch.

You need a way of testing all this wonderful data against your theories of what works. If you don’t, you will be left with a big blob of information that doesn’t do your organization much good except supply icing for colourful reports.

For example, how useful is it for you to know that, on average, your website visitors spend 40 seconds on your landing page?

Or, what intelligence do you get from knowing that your customers drop out at the third step of a registration process on your site?

You can get all of this data from analytics, but so what? How does that translate into implementing changes to your site to help achieve results? If only there was a way to use this data to help achieve business objectives…

Enter Optimizer.

It’s all about testing. No, I am not talking about a 100 question multiple choice exam. Think simpler. Think kindergarten: A or B questions. With Optimizer, you can test two different scenarios against each other to see how your visitors react (split testing) and use that raw data to see which scenario works better. It’s so simple that it makes achieving business objectives a breeze. And the best part is that you can test anything: content, call to actions, graphical elements, even user interface concepts.

Let’s take one of our previous raw data examples and see how Optimizer can help. Let’s say your customers are dropping out on the third step of your registration process and you want to find out why.

You have two theories as to why they are leaving:

#1) You are asking them for too much private information.

#2) The third step is too long and the user gets bored and leaves.

Let’s say you decide to test theory #1: you are asking too much private information (maybe you are collecting credit card data to verify someone’s age). You decide that this step is not necessary and you remove the credit card details and run a split test (some visitors go through the original registration process while some go through the modified version). You let this experiment run for a while and then review the results. The version of your site which successfully converts more visitors into registrants is the more optimized site.

Congratulations, you just ran your first simple split test and achieved a business objective: getting more registrations.

Of course, real life optimizations can be far more complex. You can run multivariate tests to see how several versions of a site perform and you can make the tests more efficient by testing multiple elements simultaneously. For time sensitive projects (such as a product launch) this type of testing becomes crucial as the website success is a function of time. By running split tests, you reduce the time it takes to discover the most optimized configuration for your site.

Running proper test campaigns takes knowledge, a good grasp of usability and a well defined business objective. Next time you are pouring over your analytics data, think about how your site is meeting your business objectives and consider how a test campaign can help you meet your goals.

Image Credit: brockvicky/cc

“What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else” By Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor of Fortune magazine

I recently read this book and I was very fascinated by it. The book focuses on world class performers and asks the question: “What makes the best in the world the best at what they do”?
Most of us believe achieving the highest levels of performance is a mix of natural talent and hard work. But this belief is wrong.

Natural talent when combined with hard work will make you better than the average, but this combination will not put you at the top of your profession. A good example is a top amateur athlete who faithfully practices for many years with blood, sweat and tears and may be the very best on their team or in their league; however they will never reach the highest peaks of their chosen sport or go on to win an Olympic Gold Medal, regardless of the amount of hard work, practice or time they put in.

On the other hand, we have all witnessed the superstars who rocket to the very top in a very short time, and play as if they were born with some sort of super -human mutant ability. They break every record and win every championship. These are the super elite, those who set the bar high for their fellow competitors. How these superstars accomplish this is what the book examines.
Researchers have concluded that an individual’s natural gifts do not a superstar make. Could it be the willingness to work harder than everybody else?

No, it’s not that!

Maybe it is just being more mentally tough (an intensified fortitude) than the average competitor?

Nope. It’s not that either.

Researchers have converged on an answer. It’s something they call “deliberate practice.”

What is deliberate practice?

Deliberate practice is a specific and unique kind of activity, and it’s neither work nor play.

Deliberate practice is designed specifically to improve performance.

The key word is “designed.” The essence of deliberate practice is to continually stretch an individual just beyond his or her current abilities. An example is Tiger Woods , who intensely applies this principle (and which is no secret among pro golfers). Tiger has been seen to drop golf balls into a sand trap, step on them, and then practice shots from that near impossible lie. Tiger Woods may face that buried lie in the sand only two or three times in a season, and if those were his only opportunities to work on that shot, he’d blow it just as you and I would.

Deliberate practice must be repeated a lot.

High repetition is the most important difference between deliberate practice of a task and performing the task for real. Two points distinguish deliberate practice from what most of us actually do. One is the choice of a demanding activity just beyond our current abilities. The other is the amount of repetition.

Feedback on results needs to be continuously available.

You may think that your rehearsal of a job interview was flawless, but your opinion isn’t what counts. Can you really trust your own judgment? In many important situations, a teacher, coach, or mentor is vital for providing crucial feedback.

Its highly demanding mentally.

Deliberate practice is above all an effort of focus and concentration. That is what makes it “deliberate.” Continually seeking those elements of performance that are unsatisfactory and then trying one’s hardest to make them better.

Its hard.

Doing things we know how to do well is enjoyable, and that’s exactly the opposite of what deliberate practice demands. Instead of doing what we’re good at, we need to seek out what we’re not good at. The reality that deliberate practice is hard can even be seen as good news. It means that most people won’t do it. So your willingness to do it will distinguish you all the more from the crowd.

Set goals before you start

Self-regulation begins with setting goals. Not big, life-directing goals, but more immediate goals (for example, what you’re going to be doing today).
From the research:

• Poor performers don’t set goals; they just slog through their work.
• Mediocre performers set goals that are very general and are often focused on simply achieving a good outcome (win the sale; get the new project proposal done.)
• Best performers set goals that are not about the outcome, but rather about the process of reaching the outcome.

The best performers are focused on how they could get better at some specific element of their work. With a goal set, the next step is planning how to reach it. Again, the best performers make the most specific, technique-oriented tasks. They’re thinking exactly of how to get where they’re going. Their plan for achieving it on that day may be to listen for certain key words the customer might use, or to ask specific questions to bring out the customer’s crucial issues.

Make self-observations

The most important self-regulatory skill that top performers in every field use during their work is self-observation.
The best performers observe themselves closely. They are able to monitor what is happening in their own minds. Researchers call this meta-cognition—knowledge about your own knowledge; thinking about your own thinking. Top performers do this much more than others do as part of their routine.
Meta-cognition is important because situations change as they play out. It plays a valuable part in helping top performers adapt to changing conditions. When a client raises a completely unexpected problem in a negotiation, an excellent businessperson can pause mentally and observe his own mental processes as if from outside, and ask:

• Have I fully understood what’s really behind the objection?
• Am I angry?
• Am I being hijacked by my emotions?
• Do I need a different strategy here?
• What should it be?

Evaluate yourself

Practice activities are worthless without useful feedback about the results. These must be self-evaluations; since the practice activities took place in our own minds, only we can know fully what we were attempting or judge how it turned out.

• Excellent performers judge themselves differently than most people do. They’re specific, just as they are when they set goals and strategies.
• Average performers are content to tell themselves that they did great, or poorly, or that they “tried their best”.

In summary, this is an excellent read. This book has changed the way I view top performers and how their skill sets are achieved. The book has also made me ask myself some very tough questions, such as:

• Do I push myself outside of my comfort zone on regularly?
• Am I good at setting goals and achieving them consistently?
• Is my ego ready for an outside perspective and assessment of my skills and coaching?
• Do I know my weak points as well as my strengths?
• Am I willing to do the work that others won’t to raise the bar?
• Am I just like everybody else who came along and tried their best? (I hope not!)

All the best,
Marc Deveraux

Image Credit : familymwr/cc

Being an Englishman living in Canada, I continuously find myself asked the same questions:

“Do you like it here”?
“How does the weather compare to London”?
“What is the queen really like”?
“Do you really eat baked beans for breakfast”?

Ok, so the last two may not be quite as common. It may be my stereotypical, satirical British humour shining through, but just in case anybody reading was wondering, to me the queen is just a very rich old lady with a shiny hat and a big house. And baked beans are a delightful snack that can be eaten at any stage of the day.

But enough about menial cultural discrepancies. The topic of my blog post today is to discuss the differences that I have noticed in the business culture between here and the UK. And I was wondering if local Vancouverites also felt the same way.

Allow me to explain. First, some background on myself: I have worked in the field of Sales and Business Development for several years, and I am always on the lookout for new business opportunities. After I moved here from England two years ago, I quickly noticed the cautious approach that some business managers and owners took when it came to business.

This is very different from the UK. This isn’t to say that business owners in the UK aren’t cautious. When a good deal comes my way, I weigh up the pros and cons and perform the necessary due diligence, just like you do. The difference I find is that once everything comes up clean, I quickly jump on the opportunity. But in Vancouver, I’ve noticed that some business professionals don’t move as quickly to seize the opportunity.

To clarify, I love living in Vancouver, and I also enjoy doing business here. But I’m curious to know if I’m the only one that feels that there is a lack of urgency when doing business in Vancouver. Maybe it’s related to the laid-back lifestyle we enjoy in Vancouver. Maybe it’s due to our apprehension and fear of becoming a victim to one of the many scams which the press seem to circulate on such a regular basis. But recently I have seen too many small and medium enterprises fail because of a lack of willingness to take a leap of faith, and try a technique or strategy which may be new to them.
Time is the enemy when it comes to building a business of significant value. Opportunity is nothing more than a window that time will ultimately close, and if we don’t capitalise on good opportunities, then it is very likely that time will run out.

One of my fellow Brits, a gentleman called Richard Branson (slightly more successful than me), was once quoted as saying, “if you don’t take risks you will never achieve anything,” and I think this is great advice for any business owner, whether they live here or elsewhere. Take your chances and become a success story, don’t get left at the starting line —achieve your business goals by acting with urgency and make the most of any opportunities which come your way.
I’d love to hear your comments on this topic. Do you feel that business is too “laid back” in Vancouver, or do you think it’s the complete opposite?

Image Credit : KennyMattic /cc

The Vancouver publication’s new issue focuses on social media success stories within British Columbia’s small business community.  SmarttNet’s Martin Wong was chosen as a key representative of Vancouver’s social media scene due to his experience in promoting small and medium sized businesses via social media. The feature article, entitled “Moving up with social media”, details the process by which Wong employed social tools to increase an important client’s web traffic by 2000 per cent over an 18 month period.

See the free online edition of Make it Business for the full article.

Photo by DeanSanderson.com as appearing in Make It Business Magazine