Usability Week 2010

The 42-Point Website Check-Up

    Full-Day Tutorial

    In 1993, only a handful of companies had websites. Today, we all have several and we’re still struggling with making them inviting, easy to use, and as effective as possible. Worse yet, there are a great many things that we have learned, but we just can’t seem to stay on top of.

    Like home maintenance, websites require constant care and feeding. When was the last time you checked the air pressure in your spare tire? How often do you really re-stain the back porch? Have you cleaned out the gutters recently? What about the laundry lint filter? Have you ever lubricated the garage door?

    Websites require the same sort of attention—and not just from a maintenance perspective. When was the last time you realigned your website with your business strategy?

    This tutorial offers a massively inclusive, far-reaching, and intentionally daunting list of what it takes to keep a website operating at maximum efficiency. But much more than just a list, the session identifies what you need to address first and fastest. It then provides practical, achievable, tried-and-true techniques for making your site work harder and smarter for your customers and your company.

    What You’ll Learn

    In this session, you’ll learn how to:

    • Organize Web people and processes
    • View your website from your visitors' perspective
    • Ban the brand blemishes your website creates
    • Get more people to your website
    • Make your website easier for visitors to use
    • View your website from a whole new angle to improve its value to your company and your customers

    Course Outline

    • Strategy
      1. Identifying goals
      2. Sorting out content ownership
      3. Assembling the skills
      4. Creating and streamline processes
      5. Prioritizing projects
      6. Managing the timeline
    • First impression
      1. Balancing form and function
      2. Avoiding the “Homepage from Hell”
      3. Shooting for speed
      4. Eliminating 404’s
      5. Offering a map
      6. Testing on live animals
      7. Striving for consistency
    • Awareness
      1. Improving search ranking
      2. Optimizing advertising
      3. Emailing for fun and profit
      4. Getting offline promotions in line
    • Navigation
      1. Viewing from the other side of the screen
      2. Avoiding anticipointment
      3. Striving for consistency
      4. Delivering the mental model
    • Content
      1. Knowing the cost
      2. Delivering the FAQs
      3. Keeping it current
      4. Making it live
      5. Embracing user-generated media
    • Communication
      1. Perfecting the newsletter
      2. Appreciating e-mail
      3. Listening to customers
      4. Monitoring reputation
    • Customer centricity
      1. Segmenting your visitors
      2. Helping them reach goals
      3. Making it “all about me”
    • Measurement
      1. Assessing advertising
      2. Measuring marketing
      3. Counting up content
      4. Calculating conversion
      5. Computing customer satisfaction
      6. Considering the competition
    • Perspective
      1. Shifting from pages to processes
      2. Embracing accountability
      3. Integrating customer intelligence

    Format

    This full-day tutorial features lecture and exercises.

    Handouts

    Copies of all presentation slides.

    Who Should Attend?

    Those who are directly or indirectly responsible for or compensated for getting results from their website. Anybody who wants to make sure they have the Big Picture of what a website should be and could be. Those who need to know which mistakes to avoid. This is a non-technical tutorial for technicians and business people.

    Instructor