Digital Design

Right! lets start this week with a little bit of digital design for dummies. Today I need to talk to you about the importance of a customer centric website. To do that I first need to understand what a customer centric website is.

A customer centric website is one that has been created with the consumer in mind. When we look at a website online, we are attracted to the visuals, what is being sold and what imagery we are looking at. A website might be visually stunning but if the back end is not created efficiently and it is difficult to navigate, the customer will not return.

Jodie Dalgleish (2000) talks about five basic things that a customer needs from a website. They are;

1. The ability to evaluate competing businesses and products
2. To choose a product and make a transaction if the product is appropriate
3. To get help when needed
4. To provide feedback
5. To stay informed and receive regular updates

The top five are a good start for creating a customer centric website. There is huge competition online and if a site is too difficult to navigate people will simply move on.

A great example of a website that ticks the boxes is www.wotif.com . Wotif gives you a variety of choices of flights or accommodation and allows you to compare prices and choose what is best for you. Although the booking process is rather laborious, they do prompt you along the way.
The website provides a Help page that offers a range of help options from most commonly asked questions, through to email with the final option being to phone them.
In relation to feedback, they offer a guest review page. it is an opportunity to comment on the experience you have had after travel.
Finally at the point of your transaction you are encouraged to provide an email address and given the opportunity to receive regular updates and promotion via email.

2.  Define the term ‘presence’. Write an additional paragraph that describes why firms that do business on the Web should be more concerned about presence than firms that operate in the physical world.

My initial feel was that if I was going to define web presence it was about how your brand and website was represented online and how easy it was to find. It turns out that Web presence is much more than that. For lack of finding a better definition, Wikipedia defines Web presence as:
The appearance of a person or organization on the World Wide Web." And "the amount of web presence can be measured in the amount of sites an organisation or individual has, which can include their own website, social network profiles, and their site's search engine ranking, traffic, popularity, and backlinks."

Web presence is enhanced by utilising things such as key words throughout your content, that will be picked up during peoples searches

The internet is a fickle place with which to do business, people can move to a new organisation at the click of a button. For that reason it is imperative that organisations spend both time and money to ensure the search trail is as user friendly as possible.

3. *Usable Doesn’t Have To Mean Ugly ‘for a web design to be truly beautiful, it has to be functional, have purpose and contribute in some way to the website’s intuitiveness, usefulness and branding. All of these things contribute to the overall effect of a design’. This is a quote from one of the articles on web design linked on Web pages that suck. Find a web page that ‘does not suck’ and discuss the features that make it work

One website that I think fits the bill for usability is http://www.bookdepository.co.uk . It is quite busy but categorised in such a way that it gives you a breakdown of categories, then within a specific category it breaks down again to more specific search options.

  

www.bookdepository.co.uk is an online book store it offers a large range of books from asll over the world at competitive prices. To navigate and make a purchase is easy, and they sweeten the deal by offering free postage all over the world, with no minimum purchase. If you are not too conscious of product miles you can buy an aussie book for cheaper than you would get it in a book shop here. If you are ethically challenged by the distance a product travels to get to your doorstop, this is not the site for you.
They have a great Help page with several different headings and subheadings within. They have a contact us page and a review page where you can review the products you have purchased. Finally you can subscribe and receive emails and offers.

My particular favourite website that sucked was this one. Check it out! I dare you.

http://heaven.internetarchaeology.org/heaven.html#bottom



References

www.wikipedia.com

www.wotif.com

http://www.bookdepository.co.uk/