Anyway

I’m not in mar­ket­ing, so I’m not going to pon­ti­fic­ate on how com­pan­ies should design the look and feel of their web­sites, nor on what they should say on their web­sites. But there are some really basic things that com­pan­ies should do to make their web­sites more usable, at least to a first degree. 

Item 1: don’t make your cus­tom­ers tell you where they live until they need to, nor what sort of ser­vices they’re inter­ested in. Case study: Rogers, a pur­vey­or of wire­less phones and oth­er tele­com ser­vices. The first screen you see at rogers.com makes you choose between res­id­en­tial and busi­ness ser­vices. If you click busi­ness, it assumes you live in Ontario. If you click res­id­en­tial, you then have to tell it which province you live in. Every time I pay my wire­less bill online, I have to go through the same rig­mar­ole. Can­’t they fig­ure out some way of giv­ing people the basic inform­a­tion and then let­ting them choose which sub­set of the site they want? Telus (anoth­er telco) does the same thing, you have to tell them which province you live in before being allowed into the site. Bell Canada (a com­pet­it­or) does this bet­ter. Not per­fect, they have this weird dia­log box float­ing in space, but it’s bet­ter. The login for people with accounts who want to pay them quickly is right there on the first page, unlike for Telus or Rogers. Maybe they should spend five minutes some time and fig­ure out who uses their sites? Or make their exec­ut­ives try to pay their own phone bills online?

Item 2: assume that some people will be lazy, and not want to type the “www.” all the time. Case study: Shop­pers Drug Mart, a Cana­dian drugstore/pharmacy. If you go to www.shoppersdrugmart.com, you get to the site. If you type shoppersdrugmart.com into your browser, you get “Unable to con­nect” as the serv­er rejects the con­nec­tion. This strikes me as bizarre and lazy; it’s not that hard to set up a serv­er to accept both types of address, and user-unfriendly to not do so.

Item 3: if you run a store, set­ting up a web site, advert­ising it, and then put­ting no con­tent on it is a waste of time. If you can­’t think of any­thing else to put on your web site, put your phone num­ber, your loc­a­tion, and your open­ing hours. A few words about products and/or ser­vices you provide would­n’t hurt either. Case study: too many, and they all make me won­der why they bothered.