The availability of the website

The availability of the website

The availability of a website is an indication of how easy it is for a user to connect to it. 

In theory this figure should be 100 per cent but sometimes, for technical reasons such as failures in the server hardware or upgrades to software, the figure can drop substantially below this.

A web-testing specialist, found that three-quarters of Internet marketing campaigns are impacted by website failures, with 14 per cent of failures so severe that they prevented the campaign meeting its objectives. The company surveyed marketing professionals from 100 UK-based organisations across the retail, financial, travel and online gaming sectors.

More than a third of failures were rated as ‘serious to severe’, with many customers complaining or being unable to complete web transactions. These are often seen by marketers as technology issues which are owned by others in the business, but marketers need to ask the right questions. The SciVisum (2005) research showed that nearly two-thirds of marketing professionals did not know how many users making transactions. their websites could support, despite an average transaction value of £50 to £100, so they were not able to factor this into campaign plans. 

Thirty-seven per cent could not put a monetary value on losses caused by customers abandoning web transactions. A quarter of organisations experienced website overloads and crashes as a direct result of a lack of communication between the two departments. 

recommends that companies do the following: 

● Define the peak visitor throughput requirements for each customer journey on the site. 

For example, the site should be able to support at the same time: 

approximately ten checkout journeys per second, 30 add-to-basket journeys per second, five registration journeys per second, two check-my-order-status journeys per second. 

● Service-level agreement – more detailed technical requirements need to be agreed for each of the transaction stages. Home-page delivery time and server uptime are insufficiently detailed. 

● Set up a monitoring programme that measures and reports on the agreed journey. 

The discovery or analysis phase involves using different marketing research techniques to find out the needs of the business and audience, whether it’s a website, mobile site, app or company social page. These needs can then be used to drive the design and content of the website. 

Analysis is not a ‘one-off’ exercise, but is likely to be repeated for each iteration of the prototype.

Although analysis and design are separate activities, there tends to be considerable overlap between the two phases.

In analysis we are seeking to answer the following types of ‘who, what, why, how, when, where’ questions, each of which has an associated analysis technique: 

● Who are the key audiences for the site (personas)? 

● Why should they use the site (what will appeal to them)? 

● What should the content of site be? Which services will be provided (value proposition)? 

● How will the content of the site be structured (information architecture)? 

● How will navigation around the site occur (findability)? 

● What are the main marketing outcomes we want the site to deliver, such as registration, leads and sales, and how will we increase them (persuasion and CRO)? 

● When, where and on which device is the online presence accessed: at home, at work or while mobile? To help answer these questions, web designers commonly use a research-based approach known as user-centred design , which uses a range of techniques to ensure the site meets user needs. This often involves ethnographic research used to build the website design or customer personas  on creating personas which summarise different customer journeys.

A structured approach to user-centred design is defined in the standard ISO 13407: 

 Human-centred design processes for interactive systems . This was published in 1999 and also covers software and hardware systems. 

We will now explore the key requirements for an online presence: business requirements and user requirements which comprise usability, accessibility and information needs. 

Business requirements  With a focus on user-centred design, there is a risk that business requirements to achieve marketing outcomes may be marginalised. A marketing-led site design is informed. Marketing objectives and tactics. common approach is to base the design on achieving the performance drivers of successful digital marketing loyalty drivers referred to at the start of this blogger. 

Design will be led by these performance drivers as follows:

● Customer acquisition – the online value proposition must be clear. Appropriate incentives for customer acquisition and permission marketing such as those described in must be devised.

● Customer conversion – the site must engage first-time visitors. Call to action for customer acquisition and retention offers must be prominent with benefits clearly explained. The fulfilment of the offer or purchase must be as simple as possible to avoid attrition during this process.

● Customer retention appropriate incentives, content and customer service information to encourage repeat visits and business must be available. 

● Service quality – this has been covered in this chapter. Service quality is affected by site navigation, performance, availability and responsiveness to enquiries.

● Branding – the brand offer must be clearly explained and interaction with the brand must be possible.Marketing-led site design is also known as persuasion marketing. Consultant Bryan Eisenberg (www.bryaneisenberg.com) was an early advocate of persuasion marketing alongside other design principles such as usability and accessibility. He says this type of focus on marketing outcome is required:

During the wireframe and storyboard phase we ask three critical questions of every page a visitor will see:

1 What action needs to be taken?

2 Who needs to take that action?

3 How do we persuade that person to take the action we desire? Fogg (2009) has developed a model to inform persuasive design. The For Behaviour Model (www.behaviormodel.org) asserts that for a person to perform a target behaviour, they must:

(1) be sufficiently motivated, 

(2) have the ability to perform the behaviour

(3) be triggered to perform the behaviour.

These three factors must occur at the same moment, otherwise the behaviour will not happen. Before we review user centred design processes, consider Mini case study  which shows how one company has developed a site that blends marketing led and user centred design.