The Australian Small Business Blog: Golden Rules of Websites

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Name: THE AUSTRALIAN SMALL BUSINESS BLOG

Location: Melbourne, Victoria, Australia

The Australian Small Business Blog has been created by Dr Greg Chapman, MBA, to provide education & support to Small Business Owners. If you would like to contribute to this blog, please email us. If you want to comment on an article, click on the speech bubble at the end of the article. If you want to see other comments, click on the hyperlinked time of post. Send a copy of the article by clicking on the envelope. Dr Greg Chapman is also the Director of Empower Business Solutions and The Australian Business Coaching Club, which provides business coaching and advice to small business owners. He is the publisher of The Small Business Achiever Dr Greg Chapman is The Business Brain Surgeon.

Sunday, October 28, 2007

Golden Rules of Websites - Rule 6 in a series

By Ron Stark

Picture yourself wanting to enter a supermarket, only to discover there's a guard standing there who won't let you go in unless you are driving a particular make and model of car. In disgust, you go to another shop, only to find that they won't let you in unless you're wearing a particular brand of shoes. The next one you visit insists that you first watch a video that consists of little more than five minutes of their logo in various poses. Would you upgrade your car, change your wardrobe, or find a shop that will accept your business regardless?

Why is it then that so many businesses make it difficult to visit their website for the most important thing you're likely to want - to get information?

We've all experienced it, of course. Those sites that insist that you go no further unless you upgrade to the latest version of Flash. Those sites that inexplicably appear to hang your computer. Those pages that take an eternity to download because some massive image or movie. Those menu buttons that take two or three clicks before they respond.

If you're like me (and many others), you are more likely to simply abandon the site in question and go to one that has no impediment to you doing business with them.

To put the question of technology into perspective, over the last four weeks visitors to just one of my websites were using 16 different versions of Flash, 19 different screen resolutions, 8 different operating systems, 21 different browsers and browser versions.

Those statistics alone guarantee that were I to build a website using just the latest technology, a significant proportion of my visitors would be unable to view it the way I intended; many would be unable to see it at all, or would be so irritated that they'd go to my competitors instead.

Only web developers and programmers get excited by "the latest technology" for websites. Nobody else cares, least of all your customers.

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1 Comments:

At 12:03 AM, Vishal Sharma said...: You are right :)
I just bumped into yr blog and site
.I'm also starting my consulting in areas similar to you, hopefully one day we can catch up as well.
Yr blog is good you need to market yr blog more vigorouly to get more readers. :)
May be i can help u with that :)