Getting caught in the web
A few years ago, in the early years of the internet, the challenge was to get businesses online. Today that battle has largely been won: most businesses have decent enough websites. Now the challenge is to convince them that having a web presence is not enough – they need one that finds new customers and drives sales.
According to Roseanne Smith, communications manager of the Irish Internet Association (IIA), the key to achieving this is aligning your web strategy with your business strategy.
“When planning a website, companies should always consider the role of the website in their overall business strategy,” she said.” A website is a cost-effective sales, marketing and communications tool, which should be at the heart of any modern business, regardless of sector.”
Some firms say they put their website at the heart of their business, but in reality they don’t. One that undeniably does is Curious Wines, winner of the recent Irish Web Awards (IWA) Best E-commerce Site of 2009. Only operational since November 2008, the online wine retailer has nonetheless impressed web veterans with the quality of its design, structure and content.
“What marked Curious Wines out from the other companies in the shortlist was the simplicity of its ecommerce facility,” said Damien Mulley, the well known web consultant and blogger who organised the awards.” Pricing is clear and there are a very small number of clicks in the buying process.”
The product pages are also particularly good, containing good clear bottle shots and descriptions. Furthermore, the site has a powerful search facility that al lows users to search according to various criteria including brand of wine, country (or wine-producing region) and price.
The site, almost inevitably, contains a blog.” I don’t understand any company that doesn’t do it,’’ said Mike Kane, who founded the site along with his brother, Matt.” It’s your primary, easiest and cheapest way of communicating on a consistent basis with your customers.
“It can be used for brand reinforcement, for product selling and relationship building with customers. And Google likes the fact you’re feeding your website with new content – that’s important as well.”
Another company that was shortlisted for the same award was fellow Cork firm Hairy Baby.
Started by entrepreneur Daragh Murphy in 2004, the company specialises in funny t-shirts with an Irish twist. In many cases, the t shirts carry slogans and symbols that would only be intelligible to an Irish audience.
Since its inception, Hairy Baby has enjoyed annual increases in sales in the region of 20 per cent. It gets approximately 18,000 visits a month, which is 25 per cent more than a year ago.
Over the years, hairybaby.ie has introduced a number of features which have helped boost traffic and cultivate a loyal following. One of these is interactivity.
“Interaction with a fun element is something we’re big on,” said Murphy.” Getting feedback from customers is a key to our success as it allows us to give them exactly what they want. We encourage our customers to send in ideas via our ‘Submit an Idea’ page. We recently ran a 1980s-style ‘How many sweets in the jar? ‘competition and our Facebook page now attracts over 3,500 fans.” Integrating with Facebook, and social media in general, is a key feature of the site, Murphy said.
“The Facebook wall system is very intuitive and the simple navigation and design means that it’s easy to use and update quickly.
Plus, with more than 100 mil lion users worldwide, Facebook allows us to spread the Hairy Baby love.”
From Hairy Baby to Babyelephant. A gifting site aimed at new mothers and expectant mothers – and another website to make the IWA shortlist – babylephant.ie was set up by Dubliner Maeve Barry in December last year and since then has been steadily building an online audience.
For Barry, useability and appearance were the most important considerations when building her site. She wanted it to be warm and welcoming so that visitors would want to linger and hopefully buy something.
“Appearance is very important,” she said.” People should be happy to look around and browse. It is also extremely easy to use – an eight-year-old could use it.’’ A clear and simple shopping engine and payment system are other key features, she added.
Barry has endeavoured to make Babyelephant as dynamic and engaging as possible. She said every website should be a work in progress and continually upgraded with new content and features. She finds a useful way to guide development is to get feedback from customers about their experiences on the site and make improvements and tweaks based on what they say. She also uses Google Analytics to gather stats on the site.
“There are a few performance metrics that we pay attention to,” she said.” The first is the total number of people visiting the site each month. We are then able to monitor their path through the website – looking at how many pages they are visiting, what they are looking at, where they leave the site and, most importantly, what percentage of them go on and buy a Babyelephant gift.
“These stats then form the basis of future site updates and also inform us on what we can afford to spend on marketing.”
The Google game
Curious Wines, Hairy Baby, Baby Elephant and other successful sites have several success factors in common. First, they tend to achieve consistently high rankings on Google. Mulley believes that having a website that both looks the part and is Google-literate is the name of the game for businesses these days.
“When your website is well designed and well structured, it means that Google can go through your website, note everything that’s on it and when someone does a search, can bring that content back to them,” he said.” So, well designed websites mean that, as well as looking good, they can perform well on search engines.”
Mulley said that, while Irish websites had improved noticeably in recent years, search engine optimisation (SEO) was one area in which they continued to lag.
“Every day when I do searches, I see websites that could rank so much higher with a few alterations and the people behind them just don’t realise that, or maybe they do but don’t think it’s worth their time.”
Successful websites also tend to be written well and structure their content thoughtfully. This is hugely important, said Randall Snare, a content analyst at web content firm IQ Content, who claimed that many Irish businesses still put most of their effort into how the sites look and neglected what was really important – the content.
“Most people are enticed by design because it’s exciting and can look really pretty, but there’s a lot of research that shows that that’s not the thing people see when they first come to a site,” she said.” The first thing you look for is content because you’ll usually want to do something when you visit a site and the content’s going to show you how to do it.”
When it comes to e-tailing sites in particular, content plays a key role in engaging the potential customer and driving them towards purchase. It is particularly important, she said, to have a series of ‘calls to action’ displayed prominently around the site, not just on the home page.
Other writing tips she offered included using lists, bullet points and subheads to break up text on the page and using clear, descriptive page titles that makes it easier for the page to be found, both by visitors to your site and by Google.
John Mitchell, managing director of web design firm Strata3, said sparse content was a feature of modern websites and he believed it was a clear response to user preferences.
“Web users are very time poor,” he said.” They are not interested in reading lots of copy. They want a very quick three clicks to the source content they want.”
From a web design perspective, this need on the part of the user has translated into an uncluttered feel, he said – more white space and less text on the home page and greater focus on key messages. “Users have a very low tolerance for messy sites,” he said.
A further characteristic that successful sites have in common is a very high level of interactivity and customer engagement.
Popular online car parts warehouse MicksGarage, for example, communicates with customers through a real-time website customer chat system, by e-mail and over the phone. It also uses text alerts in cases where customers don’t have e-mail.
In addition, it produces and posts video demonstrations onto the website, in order to bring the products closer to the customer. Mark Leech, marketing director at MicksGarage, said it was all about getting close to customers.
“The challenge of the online retailer is to try and bring the consumer experience as close as possible to the real shopping experience.”
Bells and whistles Until recently, Irish web owners tended to be quite a conservative bunch and slow to embrace innovation. However, this is beginning to change as websites look to find new ways to jazz up their image and engage visitors. Video, in particular, is finally starting to come of age.
The IDA site, for example, has the chief executives of various multinationals in Ireland talking about the benefits of working with the IDA and of being located in Ireland, while bordgais.ie has Lucy Kennedy giving a 30-second cameo about the benefits of switching to gas. Both sites are designed by Web factory.
“We are very pro video content,” said Stephen Murphy, communications director at the firm.” We believe it’s much more effective at communicating little nuggets of information about your business. People aren’t interested in reading pages and pages of text.”
Another design device that is becoming popular on commercial websites, he said, was Flash-based animation.” Flash has a very high design quality. You can rotate imagery. You can mouse over some elements. Again, it’s a really nice way of looking at some products or services because you’re not reading about them.”
With smart phones such as the iPhone all the rage, the issue of how websites appear on a mobile device is also having an impact on web design and structure. Apple’s web browser, Safari, does a good job of presenting most websites on the iPhone, but this may not go for all websites.
Murphy advised companies to investigate how well their website rendered on a PDA. If it does not look well, they should consider developing a mobile version of the site with stripped down design and content.
MicksGarage is among the e-tailing sites that’s taking the mobile opportunity seriously. While the site is currently accessible through iPhones/PDAs, work is being done to improve the user experience, said Leech.
“While some may question if consumers will order car parts over their phone, a few years ago they also questioned whether consumers would order car parts over the internet and MicksGarage is testament that the doubters were wrong,” he said.
“The reality is that, while a high intensity of shopping activity through the phone may be some way off in Ireland, handsets are developing rapidly, so it’s important that retail websites develop in tandem.” It is also important for smaller businesses to develop their websites to appeal to their customers.
“Some of our largest web-hosting customers are SMEs who are spending six-figure sums annually because their whole business is on the web,” said Mark Fagan, BT’s head of data centre services. “They may only have 20 employees but they are turning over a big amount of money.”
So, what of the future? How will Irish websites look and feel over the coming years? Will they continue to evolve and toy with new innovations?
Kane of Curious Wines is all for stretching the potential of the web and believes that keeping a website visited and respected requires constant work and attention.
At the same time, he believes that online entrepreneurs have got to know what business they are in, and this is something they should never lose sight of.
“We’re a wine shop,” he said.” We’re there to sell stuff, not entertain. So our website is absolutely, unmistakably a shop.”
