Design a business, not a website

Posted on March 2, 2009 by Asi Erenberg

Design a business.JPG
Many ecommerce businesses will be redesigning their sites in 2009. Some may be spending the money just because their site needs a “new look” – but for most it will be because the site has never really done what it was meant to do in the first place.
A recent survey by Internet Retailer magazine noted the following reasons for site redesigns: “Improved site optimization is the top priority for 72.9% of merchants, followed by clearly organized home, category and product pages at 62.4%, better navigation at 49.4%, improved site search at 47.1% and faster checkout at 40%.”

This translates into:
• Search Engine problems – the site isn’t optimized for Google and other search engines, so it doesn’t appear high enough in search results. Potential customers are perhaps finding competitors’ sites, rather than this one.
• Navigation and structural problems – visitors find it cumbersome to get to the pages they need, or they don’t find the information they wanted on the page(s) they expected.
• Conversion problems – visitors just aren’t buying enough, so ROI is low.
• Search problems – the site needs a better internal search engine.
• Usability problems – a long or complicated checkout process that confuses the customer.

The trouble is, that many of those redesigned sites won’t be any better than the previous ones at doing what they’re meant to do – attracting potential buyers, helping them find what they need on-site, and converting them into customers. Why not? Because their owners think they’re designing a website.

If you’re selling online, you’ve got an online business. So you should be building a business, not designing a website. The website is just the tool.

Building a business is a lot more complicated than designing a website. Perhaps a better analogy is building a house. When you build a house, you work closely with the architect to make sure he knows exactly what you want. You figure out who’s going to use each room, and when, and for what, and how the orientation and design of the room will support its function and its users’ needs. And you know you need a team of specialists - an architect for the vision and the look-and-feel; an engineer for statics; an electrician, a bricklayer and others specialists for the behind-the-scenes installations; an interior designer for the details that make the house a pleasure to spend time in, and so on. And a contractor to oversee the whole project and make sure all the experts work together.

Building an ecommerce business is like that. You don’t need a “website designer” who can do it all; you need to decide what you want (and figure it out with professional help if you aren’t sure), plan everything in advance, in detail, and then have a whole team of people with different skills for execution:
• A project manager (someone who “owns the project” and acts as the contractor)
• An Ecommerce business analyst (to conduct the research, plan strategy, find out what your competitors are doing that may be worth mimicking, and find the “opportunities” that those competitors are not taking advantage of)
• A Search Engine Optimization specialist (to do the SEO development and manage all your SEO requirements)
• A copy writer who not only writes great copy for websites but also knows enough about SEO to embed the right keywords in it at the right places, the right number of times, yet end up with text that looks natural
• An Information Architect
• A user-experience specialist
• A designer
• An art director (to create the style guide and give directions to the designer)
• A programmer
• A quality Assurance specialist

Wow! – you’re probably saying. Do I really need all that? Oh yes. Anyone can design a website of sorts, but building a successful ecommerce business is highly interdisciplinary. It draws not just on computer science and information architecture, but also on mathematics and statistics, cognitive psychology, consumer behavior, social networking, human-computer interfaces (especially online usability), linguistics, marketing, retailing, and more.

You, the business owner, are mostly involved with the initial planning process. The result of it should be a detailed set of needs and requirements. This document is crucial. If you don’t get it right, your ecommerce business won’t succeed no matter how much graphics design and programming you throw at it. But most business people can’t get it right on their own – they need the equivalent of an “ecommerce business analyst” to help them consider the possibilities, see the implications, and make the right decisions. This is such an elementary need, that at Ecommerce Partners we developed a detailed methodology just for the planning stage. Just to give an idea of what’s involved; here are some of the issues it covers:

• Objectives and Expectations
• Target Audience
• Competitive Analysis
• SEO Keyword Research
• User and Functional Requirements
• Search and Content Requirements
• Technical Requirements
• SEO Requirements
• Navigation Tree
• Labeling and Thematic Architecture
• Functional Design
• User Experience Guidelines
• Creative Brief - the visual elements of the site, the brand identity, the type of audience, the “story” the site should tell, the tone and imagery that the site should take on

Complicated? Well, not really if you do have the right partner. But if the groundwork is not done properly from start, you’ll probably find yourself redesigning your website – again and again and again…

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