Warmest Greetings,

:: Wednesday, December 17, 2003 ::

Jupiter Research Reports That One in Seven Consumer-Facing Web Sites Has an Error on Their Home Page Severe Enough to Cause Visitor Defection

"Based on a December 2003 review of 239 well-known consumer-facing Web sites, Jupiter Research's new report "Managing Web Site Quality: Stanching Customer Defection" found that one in seven consumer-facing Web sites had prominent errors on their home pages. Of the home pages tested, which ranged across a variety of industries, 24 had broken links ("404" errors), 14 provoked server errors, five linked to sites with nonexistent host names, and three pointed to servers that responded with server unavailable errors. In all, Jupiter Research tested over 22,000 links, more than 50% of which were routed through manual "redirect" or tracking scripts, to measure consumer behavior, a tactic especially prone to generating errors."

Has no one heard of Quality Assurance testing?

What amazes me about these figures is the lack of attention to obvious details, and acknowledgement by the website owner(s) that anyone even uses their website. If you're going to put a website on the Internet, it's like owning a car or having a human body, or being in a relationship. It takes maintenance. Communication. Testing new ideas. Understanding how it works. Paying attention.

For websites there are free or budget tools to help. It's cheaper to run pages through link checkers to check for broken links than it is to run to the store and buy vitamins to help fortify your body.

"According to a recent Jupiter Research Executive Survey, the number one challenge faced by Web site operators is improving site usability (49% of respondents), a priority that outweighs the challenge of budget constraints (47% of respondents) or measuring ROI (40% of respondents)."

Nowhere in that sentence did they mention getting high rank in Google.

Website usability is not difficult to accomplish. It's not about "what you like" and "what browser do we build for". It's about knowing who your website visitor is.

This is the challenge. This is who you build for. Not search engines. Not the CEO. Not your boss. Not your own ego.

Usability testing can be expensive but I designed a way to provide affordable website testing for SEO's who provide evaluations for their clients to help improve traffic, rank, PageRank, etc. I hate to keep mentioning that I do this, but of the thousands of SEO's out there, only five companies have ever offered my services to their clients.
My approach isn't to criticize a website. That's not what my usability website reviews are about. My job is to represent the people who are going to use your website and my approach is to teach you how to make your site lovable so that they want to return, link to it, recommend it and buy from it.

"According to David Schatsky, Senior Vice President of Research at Jupiter Research, "Despite the high priority of improving site usability, the basics of Web site operations - having error free pages, consumer-friendly messaging and navigation that makes sense - require putting yourself in the visitor's shoes, a tact only indirectly served by traditional quality assurance."

For getting into the heads of your users, there is affordable user testing (you pick and choose the folks if you want to) at Site Report.com and you can ask questions, for free, at Cre8asiteForums' Website Hospital.

Here are more FREE usability testing checklists and surveys.

The means to improve usability are out there for those willing to nurture their sites.

Other than my rant...

Organic vs Paid

"I'm certainly aware of the classic 80:20 rule, but doesn't this clearly show that 86.5 percent of your business is probably not coming from the 13.5 percent of referrals sent by search engines, unless of course, that 13.5 percent of global referrals is 100 percent of what you've managed to target?"

If you want to see more of my opinion.

Why Bother?

"So, why bother if they (Search Engines) don't really take any action and this is just blowing smoke up our you-know-whatzits?"

:: posted by Kim Krause Berg on 12/17/2003 01:04:15 PM

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