by Therese Joseph, Shift PR Fellow

In this digital age, technology is advancing at dizzying speeds.  If you own a business, it is practically mandatory that you have a website.  Not having a website could hurt the success of your business.  However, having a website that does not meet the needs of your users is a mistake that can also hurt your business.

There are many tell-tale signs that your website is not measuring up.  Some signs include a lack of traffic and a high bounce rate.  But these signs do not tell you where your website is going wrong and how to fix it.  To find your mistakes, you’re going to need at least two things:  your user personas and content analysis.

What is a user persona?

I introduced the concept of users and user personas in my previous post, Website Design PT2: You Have Users.  You can read more about everything that goes into a persona there.  But for the sake of this post, a user persona highlights essential information about who is coming to your website and what they are trying to do on your website.  Most likely, you have a couple of user types that vary in age, experience with your company, and experience with technology.  Each of these types would have their own persona.

What is a content analysis?

A content analysis is a two-part process that involves a content audit and an analysis of that audit.  A content audit is a listing of the individual web pages, the information on them, and how the pages link to one another.  An audit can vary in detail from a top-level skim or detailed sections of your website to a comprehensive listing of every page and link on your entire website.  This information is usually organized into a spreadsheet because the depth and amount of links can become very complex.

The purpose of a content audit is to define what information is on your website currently.  Once this is known, you can compare this information to your user personas, and specifically the tasks your users are trying to accomplish.  This is the analysis portion of a content analysis. Typical questions during the analysis include:

• What information do I have that my users want?
• What information am I missing that my users want?
• What information do I have that my users don’t want?
• What information am I repeating in multiple places? Should that be repeated?
• Is there information I have that should be repeated in other places?
• How many steps does it take for my users to find the information?

These types of questions help you identify information that you are missing or that is unnecessary. Sometimes to find the specific wording or the specific organization of content that is preferred by your users, a content analysis is paired with user testing.  User testing, like user personas, allows you to gain insight into the thought processes of your users by questioning how they would search for the information you provide.

Learning from Past Mistakes

Using a content analysis in tandem with your user personas will allow you to identify where you’ve gone wrong in the past and to fix those mistakes in the future.  Learning from your mistakes is essential to maintaining a successful website.  All websites are large structures of information, but a well-designed website doesn’t feel large.  A well-designed website pays close attention to its content and how it is organized.  They avoid mistakes like too much information, a lack of information, or hard-to-find information because these are all issues that will drive away their users.  For your website to be successful, you need your users to keep coming back.

If you operated alone in the world, this information would be everything you would need to know to redesign your website.  However, this is not the case.  Businesses have competitors and allies.  In the digital world of websites, your business is not only being compared to your biggest competitor but also to every website your customers have ever used.  Your content needs to be competitive in terms of your industry, but your look, features, and navigation need to be competitive with the latest websites out there.  This brings us to the next step of the process.

The Next Post…

This post is the third in a series of posts on website design being published this month.  If you’ve enjoyed this article, watch for my next post, Website Design PT4: Competition in a Digital World, where I’ll be explaining how to discover who your competition is and how your website is measuring up.   The post will go live on Thursday, August 28.  If you missed our first post, Website Design PT1: 5 Wrong Assumptions, check it out to learn about 5 common assumptions about website design that couldn’t be more wrong.  Our second post, Web Design PT2: You Have Users discusses the concept of users over online audience, and how understanding users can help you create a more effective website.