Things You Can Do to Improve Your Website that Will Require Some Investment

I often remind our clients that their website is the most important communication tool they have. What puzzles me is how often a discussion about budgeting for website maintenance brings to light that they actually allocate more funds for employee cellphones than they do for their website! This is completely backward; a cellphone may connect you with another person directly, but a website can connect you with many people simultaneously. When you look at the value these two communication devices offer in that way, it makes sense to budget more for ongoing website upgrades, above and beyond the cost of its initial design and build, than for cellphones.

There will always be small tweaks that you can make to your site at no cost, like those I listed on the previous page, but there will be many opportunities to use valuable new technologies and techniques on your site that, while potentially costly, will add significant value to it. The list below includes some upgrades that we routinely recommend that our clients implement; I've ordered them from what I would expect to be least expensive to most expensive.

This feature is actually implemented more rarely than I'd expect. In fact, I had a hard time finding a site that I frequent that has it (even ours doesn't have it yet, but don't worry, it's coming). However, I really appreciate it when an article I comment on gives me the ability to follow future comments. I tend to comment on several articles per week, so without this feature, I'm likely to forget which ones and miss out on a good conversation after I put in my two-cents. If you've got commenting functionality, make sure you give your readers the ability to follow the thread.

If your website exists to market a product or service, then your goal should be to get your visitors to engage with you in some way. Perhaps that's simply to contact you for more information, sign up for a newsletter, register for an event, or download a whitepaper. Whatever your calls to action are, make sure they are clearly identifiable, simple to understand, and easy to respond to. Have you ever gone to sign up for a newsletter but gave up when you were faced with fifteen required fields? Why do they need to know your dog's name anyway? Follow this simple maxim: Don't ask for more information than you need. Notice that the 'Sign Up for our Newsletter' form above only asks for the user's name and email address- you could probably pare it down even more by removing the 'name' field. Keep in mind that if your content is sincere and compelling, people will want to engage with you more, so there's no need to veil your calls to action in unclear language or obscure them with fancy images meant to hide the fact that a user is heading right for a form. Mark them clearly, focus their titles on the action (think "sign up," "register," "join," etc.), and don't forget to thank users once they're done.

See some clear CTA's in action:

I am convinced that as the technical capabilities of the web increase, its visual properties will become more and more important to how we engage with information online. Many people tend to scan through navigation systems to get an overview of available options before choosing a path. Designing drop-down menus with navigation-oriented users in mind can yield some exciting interface options that are much more dynamic and compelling than the average list of text links. Many supermenus will have multiple columns and even images in line with the navigation options. This works especially well for sites that want to bring a collection of content that might ordinarily be organized within a third level of sub-navigation closer to the "surface" of the site.

See some supermenus in action:

In the second part of our recent article on The Future of the Web, I noted that as of March, 2009, a total of 21.4 million iPhones had been sold, roughly 30% of which were sold in the United States alone. That's a lot of people using the iPhone! And guess what, many of them are loading websites using the iPhone Safari browser, which renders sites nicely, though shrunk down to fit the 320 x 480 screen. Creating an alternative template for your site that is designed for the iPhone's screen would be a great way to make sure that its users actually get some value from your page. This might involve simply identifying a separate CSS file, or could get as specific as isolating only certain content configured specifically for iPhone use. Recently, Smashing Magazine assembled a mega-list of iPhone-specific site templates. Make sure to check out our friends at Viget Labs, who did a great job narrowing the iPhone version of their site to only the most important information a mobile user might want to see.

Above I mentioned adapting drop-down menus to give more information to users who were inclined to explore a site by scanning through its navigation menu. While some tend to interact with websites in that way, others are more search oriented. Many large-scale websites, like Apple and Amazon, have created truly innovative search tools in order to make the vast amount of content on their sites more accessible to users.

Rather than forcing users to engage with complicated filters or page after page of listed search results, the more efficient approach is to create an advanced search tool that retrieves and categorizes results as a user types their query into the search field. For an impressive example of this, check out Apple.com and search for "laptop" in the field at the top right of the navigation bar. By the time you've typed "lap," you'll already see images and descriptions linking you to all of Apple's laptops, as well as their laptop accessories. If you don't happen to see what you were looking for in the immediate results, click the link at the bottom of the window that says "View All Search Results." You'll be redirected to a comprehensive categorized list of all laptop-related content on the site. This tool is so well built, though, that chances are good that you'll rarely find yourself on the "all search results" page- you'll have already gone directly to the content you were looking for.

See some advanced search tools in action: