There are only two things you need to get right to have a great website. The first is – meet your users’ expectations. When they arrive on your site, are they content they’ve arrived at a place that’s going to meet their needs, or are they not quite sure? Do you have exactly what they came to the site for, or do they need to look somewhere else?
The second is – make it easy to use. When they go to use your site, do certain elements confuse them and leave questions in their heads? Do they ever get frustrated? Or do they find it easy and time-efficient to complete whatever tasks they came to the site to complete?
[inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]Meet users’ expectations. Make it easy to use. Do those two things well and you’ll have a great website.[/inlinetweet] Do them not so well, and your business will suffer the consequences.
While it may sound easy on paper (or monitor), it takes an immense amount of hard work to make sure this happens. After all, website users are mostly anonymous. You don’t know their names. You don’t know their personalities. You don’t know what they came to your site to accomplish. Let’s face it, the things you don’t know probably outweigh the things you do know.
But to be truly awesome, you’ve got to work at turning that around. [inlinetweet prefix=”” tweeter=”” suffix=””]You’ve got to do what you can to know more things about your site users than you don’t know.[/inlinetweet] If you’re going to successfully do the two things you need to do to have a great website, you’ve simply got to buy-in to becoming awesome at analytics. Don’t let analytics get the shaft because you’re only concerned with SEO, PPC or the rage of social media. I know, I know, you think your website’s fine and you just need more traffic. It’s normal to think that way. But you want to be better than normal, right?
If you truly do, analytics is a key component to finding the insights (answers) about the things you don’t know so that you can do the two things you need to do right better (both on and off the web).