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By Maribeth
Sullivan
Most travel businesses are
aware that a Website is a necessity now. Customers need to know about
your services. And there are plenty of “Website designers”
ready and willing to create whatever you want. Creating a Website is
not really difficult. But designing a business Website that really works
well, is much more complicated.
I remember an unhappy visit
to the United Airlines site about a year and a half ago. All I wanted
was to know about flight times and prices to Phoenix. Their homepage
had a nice traditional corporate look, inspiring confidence. But after
wading through six or more screens of corporate chatter, I reached a
form requiring me to provide my name and other personal information
before they would even tell me what flights they had.
Excuse me? Click – I
shot off to a competitor’s site where I accessed the information
easily and promptly booked a flight. United had spent a huge amount
of money on a Website that managed to send me directly to a competitor.
To United’s credit,
they did redesign the site so that flight information can be accessed
starting right on the homepage now. You can still get press releases,
investor information and much more at the site, but United realized
that they were in the air travel business and their main site users
were there to find out about their flights. They have now made it painless
for customers to get that information.
One of the biggest mistakes
businesses make in creating their Websites is failing to truly understand
the significance of the Web. A Website is not your ad or brochure or
quarterly report. (Heaven help the clients who have advertising agencies
design their Websites!) As a matter of fact, it’s not about you
at all - it’s about ME – the customer. No matter how great
you are, you are just another business. And I am the one who counts
because I control the mouse.
The Web requires a whole
new perspective in marketing – customer-centric marketing. And
rest assured, a business Website is about marketing. Anyone applying
mass marketing techniques to the Web is doomed. Whether you are creating
a new Website or redesigning an existing one, the first thing you should
plan on is ensuring you get a customer-centric design. But how do you
do that?
To start, you need to be
clear about your business and the goals of your Website. Whether you
are a one-man travel agency or United Airlines, you need to be able
to answer hard questions like:
• What exactly is your
business?
• Who are your competitors and what makes you different from them?
• Why do you want a Website?
• What information will you provide?
• Will customers be able to accomplish tasks like booking reservations
or calculating exchange rates?
• Do you need real-time customer service capabilities?
• Will you have a newsletter tie in to your Website and what are
the ramifications?
• Will you be (I hope) collecting data on your customers and if
so, what data and why?
• What will you do with this data and how?
Our experience has shown
that far too many travel companies have failed to address these questions,
failed to understand that a good looking site is not necessarily a good
site and have paid the price – literally- for their mistakes.
If your Web developer isn’t
asking you these questions right up front, you need another Web developer
or you need an information architect to come in and help you clarify
your business goals and information requirements. Otherwise you are
simply wasting your money.
It really doesn’t matter
how great your Website looks or how clean the coding is; if your customers
can’t find what they want and accomplish what they need to accomplish
on your site, you are throwing your money away. So you also have to
have a clear idea of who your customers are.
Really good Web developers
use this customer information to create “personas” or characters
based on your target audience. They design specifically for these personas,
testing the functionality of the designs to make sure they work. The
term for this is usability testing. If United had done their homework,
identified their primary users and tested their original site for usability,
they wouldn’t have had to go through the pain and expense of a
complete redesign so early on.
Have you noticed that I have
been talking about “design”, but I haven’t said a word
about graphics or images? This is because I am talking about conceptual
design. Everything should be mapped out and accounted for before a single
image is created or “look” is determined. If you take away
nothing else from this article, at least remember that all “Web
designers” are not created equal. And anyone who starts showing
you sketches before asking all the hard questions and developing detailed
plans is doing you an expensive disservice.
A Website is a powerful tool
in your marketing arsenal. It needs to be integrated with other marketing
efforts and it absolutely needs to be customer-centric. A Website is
not about you; it’s about me. If your site serves my needs, I will
come back again and again. If not, you’re wasting your money.
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