Is Your Web Design Contributing to Marketing Strategy Success?

In ‘product’ design circles, it is a given that great product design, where features, functionality and usability are given high priority in the design process, influence the successful adoption and market penetration of a product. However, in the Web design industry, where form can sometimes take priority over function, the consequences are far wider reaching than simply a less than optimal user experience.

Back in the early days of the Web, when designers worked to maximize the features of the then available Web programming and design tools, Web sites were ultimately designed for the single factor limiting the delivery, the end user Internet access service, which until recent years was a 52 kiloboytes per second, dial up analogue connection. With the advent of broadband, delivering content at  speeds of 1 – 20 megabits per second, designers and programmers have discarded the narrowband design approach in favour of a design process which often seemingly incorporates filling Web sites with every available functionality, application, media types and images of a plethora  and variety of file sizes. The result is often pages bloated beyond their optimum performance size and user’s frequently becoming disengaged.

Until the advent of the Internet, marketing was treated as a weird art, where it’s proponents were suspicious types afforded only by the few organizations large enough to have a ‘mud at wall’ budget that enabled them to employ one or more of these folk who would arrive with their Rolodex of ‘advertising’ industry contacts and expense accounts. Even though these marketing folk would painstakingly devise above and below the line marketing plans, they were often never given the keys to the ‘C’ level ‘business’ facilities and were avoided by the ‘real’ business folk . The arrival of the Internet however changed all of this, as for the first time, organisations of all sizes could see in real terms the demonstrable effect than marketing had on the bottom line. As a result, how often today do you see a piece of marketing, whether it is print, TV, radio or other offline media where the organisations’ web site is mentioned in an effort to drive the prospect to the site and  measure the effectiveness of that particular piece of media?

To any web designer, the ever present threat of danger is both the browser ‘back’ button and the fact that web users today often have multiple tabs/windows open and perform simultaneous searches whilst multitasking. To believe when a web user is browsing and searching on the Web, that they are giving their total undivided attention to one task and web site, is naive. If a prospect for yours or your client’s business decides that the site they are waiting to load it taking too long, they will be off, hitting the back button returning to the Google results page or having already opened another competitor’s site in the background, decided that yours is not worth the wait. The result, not only lost business, but also wasted cost, time and effort.

Think of it like this…

If you or your clients spend £1million a year on marketing, aimed at driving traffic to the Web site where you can convert and measure the success of each £1 spent whether for brand or lead development, then engagement matters. If the Web site is bloated utilizing features that move the site from function to form, then you may as well be enjoying the experience of standing in a cold shower ripping up five pound notes.  Fact is today, that for every additional second that a site takes to load, more and more users leave. With the industry reporting that at after just three seconds of waiting, nearly 60 percent of visitors leave, it’s not difficult to appreciate why so many web sites have such high site abandonment rates. If a site has an abandonment rate of forty percent, then fact is, that if you are spending £1million a year on marketing, you are wasting annually £400,000 as 40% of your visitors don’t bother to engage. Of course some bounce is unpredictable as users leave sites for other reasons, but let’s face it. Who visits web sites by accident these days? When was the last time you put up a web site, did not tell anyone about it and yet you had visitors? Wow, if we could do that, we would be asking Whoogle?  Oh and whilst we are on the subject of Google, we now know that site speed affects search engine rankings so the slower your site loads, the harder the job for the SEO guys becomes and conversely, the faster the site loads, the better the search engine result. Every visitor has a cost of production and we owe it to our stakeholders to maximize our investment in them.

Now I can already hear you thinking, but the web, the tools and the bandwidth, gives us so many opportunities to entice our audience with great design and features, making for a rich user experience, so why would we go backwards to the days of hypertext only sites to make site’s load in less than 3 seconds. Well, don’t worry I am not suggesting that, but I am proposing that we need to think about site load times and design is an influencing factor.

Just take a look at Facebook and test their site load time using www.webpagetest.org the last time I checked the front page loaded in under 2 seconds. Also, think about the mobile version of the Web site you are designing. With smaller processors, screen sizes and limited cellular bandwidth, is the standard web site appropriate or would an alternative mobile site be more successful?

On the back end or server side as we call it, ensure that the site is hosted on the best connected server you can afford. Then there is the network. At Webyro, where we work with a number of the worlds leading network providers, we understand the technologies required for efficient content delivery. Not only do we, by working alongside our partner networks, consult, design and deliver content delivery solutions for the largest brands, but we also help smaller businesses get their content out there faster.

A content delivery network comprises three fundamental aspects, replication, proximity and acceleration. A good content delivery network or CDN as it is technically referred to, uses a number of network dispersed servers or caches that replicate the content, ensuring that a copy of the content is stored locally close to the requester, so that each time the content is requested it is served from this cache rather than going back each time to the origin server. A great content delivery network provides the caches on a tier 1 IP backbone capable of delivering static content blisteringly fast and streaming live content  at speeds as close as possible to perfection, in order to minimize packet loss and ensure HD streamed video quality. Then there is the dynamic content, created on the fly for each individual visitor to your site where the content each and every time is generated on the server and cannot be cached. At Webyro, we build a solution that takes this content and optimises it in real time across the network (referred to as Front End Optimisation or FEO) and delivered at improved speeds regardless of the browsers device of choice, whether they are looking on a PC, tablet, Smartphone or TV.

When you next create great design for you or your client’s Web site think about a few things such as

• What is the time that the site takes to download? Test it, can you the speed the site up by moving any cacheable features to a CDN?
• If your site was to go viral and consequently a big chunk of the online world wanted to see it, could the origin server cope or would you end up with the dreaded brand nightmare of ‘This site is unavailable’ meaning a CDN is a must have for times when your origin server cannot cope with the heavy lifting
• If you are designing content around a dynamic site what are you doing about front end optimisation, if your static content takes time to load, this will only further impact the dynamic content as it attempts to speed across the network. For best results, look at combining a CDN with a front end optimisation solution for the content created on the fly
• What percentage of your users are viewing the site’s content on mobile or other divides and have you designed appropriate versions of the site?
• And finally, if you have such a large site that you already use a CDN, is it the right one?, have you the right FEO solution in palace or increasingly as is being seen by the largest brands, are you deploying more than one CDN and using a CDN load balancing tool to ensure the highest site delivery and availability metrics are achieved.

Webyro support the evaluation, selection and integration of Web site acceleration and content delivery solutions without compromise on cost, quality or performance. If your organization is currently evaluating Web site infrastructure requirements for the next phase of growth or in support of existing tactical effectiveness. Whether you are a content owner or service provider looking at how you deliver effective content delivery services for your customers or partners, Webyro whether as part of a strategic review or as part of building an integrated solutions approach can identify, select and deliver the right components for your team solution and get you and your partners content first across the line as part of a winning team effort.