We're finally at that point in the adoption of Net and Web technologies where we've begun to create a solid body of knowledge about how people use the Web and what that means for the way we design Websites and marketing and other communications programs.
We know that the Web and the Net are information media. They're not display media like print nor are they entertainment media like television. Instead, people use the Web for information-based tasks.
The most popular single activity is electronic mail. People research major purchases. Thirty-seven percent of the homes purchased in this country, and 40% of the automobiles are purchased by people who conducted some of their product or buying research on the Web.
Reading news is one of the most popular activities. And a recent Poynter Institute study tells us that the way people read news on the Web is different from the way they read it in the physical newspaper.
In the physical paper, eyes are attracted first to graphics and other visual devices. On the Web, those come second to the information.
We know some other things about how people read on the Web. The Poynter Study looks only at news readers, but we have some other usability studies that tell us that folks are far more likely to scan rather than read, and that when they do read, they read about 25% slower on the Web compared to print.
Many folks print out long copy, rather than read it on the web. That means your pages should pass the "Print Test" - folks should get what they expect when the click the "Print" button.
There are also some emerging habits that we can take note of. One important one seems to be that many Web users hop quickly from page to page and site to site searching for information. When they find the information that looks promising, they often read a bit to make sure that they're right, then either save or print the page immediately for later reading offline.
All this is leading us to some design points.
First, the design should be information-centric. Web pages and communication programs should be designed to help people find information quickly, scan it easily, and capture it effortlessly. Essentially, we're seeing the emergence of two kinds of Web pages. There are content pages, which are rich in data, information or knowledge. There are navigation pages, which serve primarily to point the way to content pages.
We're also developing some design rules around the things that you don't control on the Web.
You don't control bandwidth. As a designer or Website owner, you have no control over the quality of connection your visitor uses. In fact, that connection is overwhelmingly likely to be a dial-up connection, such as America Online. The best data we have on this right now is that 90% plus of the connections from U. S. households are dialups. Businesses are more likely to have a high bandwidth connection, but still less than a third of them do. On most nights on many consumer and business sites, more than half the traffic is coming from America Online.
This means that you must design your site primarily for those low bandwidth connections. That's true even if you are a high-tech company, since many business users are using dial-up connections from home, from hotel rooms, and from office locations that do not have high bandwidth connections.
In addition to not controlling bandwidth, you also do not control the size of the browser window. Many users prefer to bring up many small windows rather than one or two windows the full size of the screen. That makes it important that you design your pages with critical information and benefit-laden messages at the top.
You also do not control the page on which visitors enter your site. They may come indirectly on a favorite page. A Business Week study conducted in 1998 indicated that 80% of Web activity involved visits to pages that had been visited before. This means that you must design your site so that every critical navigation element, access to search engine, site map, contact information, and any key actions need to appear on every page.
The most popular way that people find Websites is through word-of-mouth, but search engines remain important. That means that you must design your site with features that work well with search engines and their ranking algorithms.
Page titles should be short, highly descriptive statements of what is on the page. They generally should not begin with an article, but rather with the most important potential search word.
You should use description and key word metatags to help search engines accurately index and describe your pages. The use the keyword metatag to let the search engine know what words you think folks will use to search for you.
Once they find your site on a search engine, folks will see a short description of your site displayed along with those of other sites listed under the same keywords. Use the description metatag to describe your site in a way that makes folks want to click through to it.
Search engines aren't the only way that folks will find you on the net. Many will use directories. There's a critical difference between search engines and directories, even though we use the term "search engine" for both a lot of the time.
True search engines use software to index sites and display search results. Directories (also called catalogs or indexes) use human beings to assign websites to categories. Yahoo is the best known directory on the web.
When you design your pages, the Title tag is most important to influence how folks find you using a catalog. That's because catalogs list the pages in a particular category alphabetically by title and sometimes only the title is shown, with no additional description.
That means that your Title tag should tell folks what they'll find on your site and it should begin with a letter as high in the alphabet as possible.
You also must remember that E-mail is the dominant Net/Web activity. Any communication plan that you develop that doesn't use E-mail as a prominent feature is being less effective than it can be. But just using a simple mailto link can create trouble for you.
One problem is that the mailto link only works if the visitor has his or her mail program open. If they don't, the mailto link is inoperative. When the mail doesn't work, we've found that most folks, just assume there's a problem with the link. They don't try to open their mail program.
The second problem with the mailto link is that spammers love mailto links. The spammers can send out their little programs that send email to every mailto link they find. This can result in lots of unwanted mail in your box.
The way to deal with both of those problems is to use a form to send email. That makes it impossible for the spammer programs to get you and it gives you some other options, too. You can gather information from those sending you mail, by making certain information mandatory on the form. Don't ask for too much that's not necessary and make as little mandatory as possible, but use the form to gather information.
Forms can be used with scripts that send the contents of the form straight to a database. That way you can build a record of the folks who're sending you email and what interests them. You can also ask them, on the form, if they'd like to receive other information from you. If they say, "Yes," they've opted in to your income stream. Just don't abuse the privilege.
When you design your site and your communications, make sure you use the best research we have about what works and what doesn't, what's possible and what isn't. That's the way to assure that your site does the most to help you achieve your objectives.
This feature appeared on 4 February 2001
