Consider Your Audience - Website Guidelines and Cautions

This month's column is about your web site, and while we don't advise that you get involved with details such as selecting fonts and deciding whether to use AJAX technology, this is a very public facet of your company and deserves thoughtful oversight. In particular, we encourage you think about exactly who is (or might be) visiting your site and making sure that your web design is aligned with your intentions. We can broadly classify visitors into two categories: those you hope visit your site and those you hope do not.

Intended Audiences
There is one over-arching rule to web design regarding intended audiences: design it for them, not for you. Unless you are a computer animation company, dispense entirely with the introductory animation. Web design companies love these because they are fun, creative, and allow them to increase their fees. But 99.9% of your visitors, even first time visitors, will click 'skip intro' or (worse) sit there tapping their fingers in annoyance waiting for the intro to finish.

The most important information you can have in designing your site is finding out why people visit. Ask your web design team for statistics on what people who visit your site do there, and to classify the activity by first time visitors vs. repeat visitors and internal vs. external. Then design around those activities. You will undoubtedly find that people come to your site to get specific information. Make it easy to find and give them what they want.

Potential customers are a key target for your site and how to attract and maintain their interest is perhaps the most important single goal of the design process. Their arrival at your site is not an invitation to make them sit through the equivalent of a Power Point presentation or to display flashy graphics. Impress them with your ability to answer their questions quickly and clearly. Avoid vague buzzword-speak on your home page. ('We are a leading provider of enabling solutions.')

Existing customers are of course an important audience. Your two goals in serving this group are to improve overall satisfaction and to reduce the time your employees spend serving them. Too many companies address the second objective by making it difficult to reach the live employees, at the cost of the first objective. Make the web preferable to the telephone by building a great site, not by making your employees inaccessible.

Employees are possibly one of your most consistent audiences. They are most likely using the site as a reference, and possibly want information you don't want the general public to have. As with customers, you may want to build a secure, employees-only site with full directory information, and consider adding photos. In organizations larger than 100 it becomes hard to remember faces and names, and many people will spend months (years) in ignorance because they are too embarrassed to admit they forgot who somebody is. An up to date face book provides a discreet solution. You may also want to experiment with employee-contributed content in the form of internal blogs or discussion boards.

Public companies have a special audience: investors. For the most part this group should be treated like customers or potential customers, but with the caveat of regulatory compliance. Your web site is an official source of information and needs to meet all regulatory and best practice requirements. A thorough and easy to use IR section can be very helpful to current and potential investors. Be particularly careful here as you step across international boundaries into foreign capital markets. We strongly advise that your legal counsel review your website carefully (and any changes when you make them) to assure compliance.

A final group that is worth considering as an important audience for your website includes industry observers: consultants, analysts and journalists. This group can broadly impact the perception of others about your firm, products/services and client base so the information they find should be useful and up-to-date.

Unwanted Audiences
Besides all those great people like customers, prospects, employees, and your investors, you will also get many (perhaps more) 'undesirables' lurking around your web site. Again, find out what they want and make sure they don't get it.

The competition will, of course, come calling. You probably already think about this and avoid directly publishing information you don't want them to see, but make sure whoever maintains your website is doing more than just not providing links: many web sites leave private information unlinked but they remain accessible in public directories, and some creativity in manually typing web addresses unearths a trove of information. A trivial but illustrative example: a competitor notices that a URL ends with '....news/public/index.html' so manually changes this to '...news/private/index.html' and is soon digging around in your virtual medicine cabinet.

Recruiters love web sites. The only solution is to not publish employee directories. You can limit your list only to the most senior executives. Or, if you feel that showing off your 'team' is an important sales tool, consider using initials for last names. A prospective customer probably only needs to know that 'Amy S.' with decades of relevant experience is in charge of European operations.

Another reason not to publish directories is email spammers. You most likely have a standard format for email addresses ('f.lastname@company .com') and an employee directory essentially gives solicitors, identity thieves, scammers, and activists an instant email list. All they have to do is call your receptionist with a plausible reason to want the email address of a specific employee and they soon have a list for your whole company. To balance this concern with the need to address legitimate visitors, provide a list of standard contacts (legal, pr, procurement, IT, etc.) with descriptive email ('investor_relations@company.com') and simply forward those boxes to the relevant employee.

Your website is a critical face to your organization. Keep your audiences in mind and make gathering information intuitive and easy without revealing too much. Make sure content is fresh and up-to-date and create a reason for people to come back to visit again.