14 Website Design Guidelines, the Mequoda Website Scorecard™

How to Rate a Website Using the Mequoda Website Scorecard™

First impressions have never been more important than on the Web. The increase in broadband availability and the increase in user expectation have resulted in a fantastic explosion of technology and complexity. The age of the Internet has also created many websites that are like older homes that have been remodeled again and again with no master plan for making the rooms work together. Our research indicates that many of these complex websites will function much better when untangled to create a network of websites, each with streamlined functionality that the user can learn to use effectively.

This means there are many pitfalls waiting to ensnare the overworked, over-extended website publishing team. Brand integrity, clear messages, easy-to-use order flows and intuitive navigation fall victim to the race to keep up with “technology.” It may give you some relief to know that best practices in website design and execution are often a simple case of common sense—that, and an understanding of your audience’s expectations and perspectives.

To create the 14 Website Design Guidelines, we’ve reviewed hundreds of websites and interviewed dozens of website publishers. We’ve conducted a series of expert usability reviews and actual user tests to determine what we believe to be the top 14 best practices for the seven Mequoda Website Models. (See Generating Website Revenue for more information.)

While these 14 guidelines are by no means the complete list of website design practices, they are essential to sound, effective website design. We’re sure that implementation of these practices will result in happier, more satisfied, readers.

1. Strategic Intent, or Purpose

To communicate strategic intent you must know two things:

1. What are your users trying to do at your site?
2. What do you want them to do at your site?

At least one of those goals should be a way to monetize the visitor. Clear strategic intent is much easier to achieve when the website has very simplified functionality. Complex websites confuse users.

The Mequoda Method™ asks two key questions to classify websites into one of seven models:

1. Is the user looking for, content or commerce?
2. Who pays the website publisher for successful task completion, the user or the sponsor?

Knowing the answers to these questions is key to designing a website with clear strategic intent.

2. Content Webification

The Internet is not a book, magazine or newspaper. Nor is it TV, a live event or a brick-and-mortar store. The Web is a unique medium. A well-executed website offers the opportunity to do things that other media and physical venues cannot do, the execution of which is particular to the Web.

Let’s look at a few examples:

• Users buy books at Amazon because it offers a selection and an interactive capacity not available in any physical bookstore.
• eBay lets users interact in a way that wasn’t possible from traditional classified advertising or auctioneering.
• ConsumersReports.org makes 48 months of magazine content available in a searchable format, which is very differently from the same content delivered by the monthly magazine.
• Forbes.com offers 1,500 new business stories to its users every day with searches and alert services to guide them to the content they want.
• eDiets helps users choose which information program is best for them and then communicates daily, automatically, with timely, personalized information and inspiration.
• AmericanGreetings.com can deliver a gift card across town or around the world in a matter of seconds.

The key to successful website publishing lies in exploiting the user benefits that the Web has to offer at the expense of traditional media and retailers. Successful website publishers use content to create unique user benefits.

3. Relationship Building

Website success depends on providing incentives to encourage visitor email registration. Email registration permits the website to follow-up with visitors at a later date, using alerts or newsletters. If a website does not attempt to capture the visitor’s email address, visitors may never revisit. While every website should have an email capture method, the Mequoda Editorial Website Model is designed to be at the hub of a Mequoda Website Network that uses frequent email communication to drive traffic to the network’s ecommerce websites. For an editorial website, capturing opt-in email newsletter subscribers must be Job One.

4. Community Building

Some of the Internet’s most successful websites enable their users to generate more than 99 percent of website content. Monster.com, eBay and BookReporter.com are all websites that build community by letting the users do the talking. The user forums at Spirituality.com and the user product ratings and reviews at Amazon are two more ways to let the users participate in building the websites. Does the website encourage feelings of belonging, enthusiasm and loyalty? Does it motivate you to become involved by asking a question or contributing a comment?

5. Persistent Navigation

Users of your site should be crystal clear about where they are in your site, where they can go and how they can get back to somewhere they’ve been. With the exception of certain processes, like order flows, they should be able to navigate to all major areas of your website from anywhere in your website. Does your persistent navigation reflect the depth and breadth of your content? Does it provide quick and easy access to customer service? Is it intuitive? Is it consistent throughout your site?

Our research indicates that a change in top-level navigation is best accomplished when you also change the nameplate and the URL. Playboy.com, a pioneer in successful website publishing, is the gateway to a network of websites each with its own navigation, nameplate, and URL. This network of sites includes a variety of clearly branded membership and retail website types as illustrated in the seven Mequoda Website Models.

6. User Task Depth

Does the website encourage you to take the next step, such as request more information or make a purchase? We have found that there are three to five fairly common tasks that account for 80 percent of user activity at each of the seven Mequoda Website Models.

Not surprisingly, for content sites, the top task is to get more detail on a news headline. For commerce sites, the user is most often trying to complete a purchase. Browsing and searching are common to all seven Mequoda Website Models. For retail websites that involve the shipment of physical products, users are increasingly seeking to take care of customer service tasks at the website—canceling or returning an order or reporting a problem with delivery.

7. Affordance

Proper affordance means that something that is linked should look like it is—and that which is not linked should have no underlining or color-coding. Good affordance means that you aren’t making the user mouse-over the page looking for links. Good affordance also requires a website publisher to understand how different age groups expect a website to behave.

8. Labeling and Language

Far too many websites use language that is better understood by the site’s sponsoring organization than by its audience. Attention needs to be paid to the labels used in navigation and page titles so that it is consistent with itself and with the audience’s mental models for the content. The added bonus here is that key phrases and words that your audience understands will also improve your ranking in search engines, as they have been designed to evaluate relevancy as a “human” would.

9. Readability (Content Density)

We’ve known for ages in print that effective use of white space (number of columns, bolding, margins, etc.) increases reader pleasure. The same design principles apply on the Web. Actually, white space and employing Gestalt principles of continuity, similarity and proximity are even more important when formatting news content for the Web. This is because Web users tend not to read pages to determine if the content is relevant to their information search. Instead, they scan the page seeking information or clues to where they might find what they are looking for.

10. Organization (Marketing Quadrants)

On content-heavy websites, finding space to provide important marketing links is a challenge. Actual eye-tracking tests have revealed that people use a “Z” shaped scanning pattern when scouring Web pages for information. More importantly, they are less likely to scroll down the homepage than they are on pages that are several levels down. Keeping critical marketing information and contextual navigation “above the fold” is essential. Using primary marketing quadrants to generate brand-related revenue or build relationships and communities with users is the sign of a well-designed site.

11. Content Freshness

How up-to-date is the information on the website? Website credibility plummets if the home page promotes an event that occurred two months ago. Websites should be considered “works in progress” that are constantly updated if only so that they don’t bore repeat visitors. Research has shown that websites with a high update frequency generate more repeat visits per month per unique user. With the average number of websites per user going down and the average time spent on the Web going up, it is imperative that the content on your website be as fresh as possible.

12. Load Time

Two phenomena contribute to the users expectation of download time:

1. Broadband has dramatically shortened download time and
2. People are no longer going to the Web to be entertained.

They are looking for information. If they can’t get a bead on what they are looking for they will Google their way right off your site and onto another.

The Web Page Analyzer™ is a great tool for benchmark testing. It can be helpful to the designers of the site in diagnosing what’s wrong, but does not provide a 100 percent accurate measurement of load time. In order to measure a true, worldwide user experience, your site would have to be tested every 15 minutes or every half hour with every type of connection, all over the world. This would cost a lot of time and money—the Web Page Analyzer™ offers the next best thing. Go to the site and check it out.

13. Aesthetics

The average user expects professional websites to be clean-looking, information-rich, and intuitive. They respond best when the aesthetics of the site support the purpose of the site and are consistent with the user’s mental model. Is the design appropriate for the firm or organization the website serves? Layout, colors and typefaces determine the site’s personality and image.

14. Brand Preference

Most websites have a strong brand that often has roots in the physical world—but on the trend to dot-com, the brand can sometimes cause confusion. Are you building and maintaining your brand? Or are you using valuable space on your homepage to promote a “new brand” that represents you and a bunch of other players? Are you creating the type of brand preference that websites like Amazon enjoy where more than half of all visitors arrive by typing “Amazon.com” directly into their browser’s URL field?

Evaluating websites

The Mequoda Website Scorecard encourages you to score your website on each of the 14 Mequoda Best Practice Guidelines, add them together and arrive at a cumulative score. The goal is to emphasize the importance of balanced, usable websites. Your website should achieve respectable scores in all areas, rather than over-emphasizing a single area or two or omitting other areas completely.

These 14 Website Design Guidelines were developed by Don Nicholas with the help of Roxanne O’Connell, Roger C. Parker and Kim Mateus.

Tags: credibility, effective website design, email, email newsletter, generating website revenue, mequoda, Mequoda Method, mequoda website scorecard, optimization, search engine, search engines, site design, strategic intent, usability review, Website Design, Website Network, website scorecard