I presented “Designing Your Website Strategy” today at ASID Illinois’ Design Summit 2006. Some of the attendees expressed an interest in downloading the notes, so I’ve posted them here.

Designing Your Website Strategy Presentation

Thanks to everyone who attended and to ASID Illinois for inviting me. I appreciate the opportunity and enjoyed our time together!

Back in November, I started an experiment where I required visitors to fill out a form prior to seeing our prices. My thinking was that I wanted to have more people to market to.

The idea was marginally successful. Sure, I got more addresses, but the number of users who converted to paying customers was approximately equal. So the added effort was really a waste for everyone involved.

And I like Jakob’s logic (see my previous post).

See FastWebUpdates.com’s website maintenance prices.

Provide all the information users need. Fail this and you’re inviting users to leave, which they’ll do so soon enough anyway. In particular, your site should show prices (violating this guideline was the #1 Web-design mistake of 2002). If users need to search out other websites to get their questions answered, they’ll likely discover alternative solutions to their problems elsewhere rather than explore your site’s options. The more clumsy and less informative a site seems, the faster users will abandon it.

From Cross Site Behavior.

To require registration or NOT to require registration–that is the question. So let’s take an example.

Today, ChicagoTribune.com has a story on churches celebrating Darwin’s birthday. I click on the link wanting to read the article and am prompted to login or register. “The story,” I’m warned, “is available only to registered users.”

But one click to the front page of Google News and the story is right there from another source.

So, on the one hand, you’d like to have your readers’ information. But, on the other, you’d like to have readers. The question of whether or not you should require registration boils down to this: is the content on your site significantly unique that the average short attention spanned user will go through the hassel of completing your registration form?

Then let’s assume that your site is interesting and compelling enough that users register. Can you stay that way? Going back to the Tribune as an example, it’s not that I oppose registration on some sort of privacy grounds. I have a username and password–I just don’t remember them.

Requiring registration imposes both an up front and an ongoing obligation–an overhead or cost–to using your site. Does the opportunity you get from having your visitors’ information outweigh the cost of having users stop by and then leave?

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. It depends on you, your site and your visitors. But it’s definitely something to think about.

On a completely different note, the title may have made you think of Hamlet’s soliloquy. While I briefly considered writing this entry in iambic pentameter, I’ve opted instead to include a snippet and a link. Enjoy!

To be, or not to be: that is the question:
Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,
And by opposing end them?

We’ve been helping to reimplement Portland real estate site LovePDX.com.

Instead of using a standard site, we’ve implemented it using WordPress 2.0.1 as a content manager. The big advantage of doing it this way is it enables the owner to make significant text changes on his own, without calling on us.