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Have you ever looked at a new car and just fallen in love with the way it looks but then sit inside and your affection drains through the soles of your shoes? The inside is made of cheap plastic. Then you start it up and the clutch is heavy, you feel your leg about to drop off after a few gear changes. And driving it on a country road at 50mph is quite an experience, as the car oversteers and understeers you sway across the road around the slightest of bends, you imagine just how George Clooney felt in The Perfect Storm! For me that car is the Suzuki Vitara. A driving experience I would not care for again!

A great car will have great looks and an internal structure to match. Imagine a Ferrari body bolted to a Ford Ka engine and chassis, it just wouldn?t work! Whilst both are fine in their own way they are suited to very different markets. The car?s visual designers have to work in partnership with the engine designers to achieve the correct overall experience for the particular customer, whether it will be driven at Brands Hatch or Chichester town centre.

The same is true of websites. A website has an engine that links pages together in a way that should feel robust and gives the website security when taking payments, it also allows Google and other search engines to find it easily. On the other hand a website designer gets your message across to your target customers using the correct combination of pictures and words.

Designers and developers are different types of people. You have your website developer, some in the trade call them code monkeys (comes from calling mechanics grease monkeys), but this always sounds somewhat derogatory to me so I?ll steer clear. Developers are clever and often highly paid individuals who create computer code using specialist languages with exotic names like Java. They enjoy using computers, work late into the night and in my experience tend to have ?monitor tans?, an almost translucent skin shade toned from the glare of their monitor screens.

Your website designer is quite a different person. They enjoy the arty side of life. With the ability to express meaning using simple pictures and convey clear emotion with words they can communicate your key messages to your audience in a few seconds. The web designer may have dropped out of Art College but in-between downloading music from the internet and playing computer games they have honed a skill with computers and learnt to be a dab hand at internet design.

So, there are your two website professionals. Whatever stage you are at with the internet whether you are considering a website, are in the process of designing one or you are already online do you have both bases covered? Do you know what to look for in a web design company? Here are some indicators of how to identify a designer or a developer, what sort of questions might they ask and why.

Web designer
A web designer will want to understand who your audience is. In order to set the tone of the design it is important to know if you are communicating to the Ferrari crowd or the Ford Ka crowd? What do they like and dislike, how do they like to be communicated to, what newspapers do they read; The Sun or The Times?

They also may want to know what the psychology of your target customer will be. Will your customers be buying gifts for others, or items for their own use? The answer can produce a totally different look to the website.

A designer should understand your intended main messages. If you are not sure what they are, consider the four second rule. A customer will make up their mind about staying on your site within four seconds. So, what are the top three or four key words or short phrases you want to say to them in that time? Try writing these down. It can be interesting to go to your competitors? websites, write down the first four words that pop into your mind when looking at the site. What are they saying to their customers?

And then comes the magic. Your website designer will conjure up a site that communicates your messages to your audience in an appealing way. This does not mean having to create expensive Flash movie introductions, a good simple design usually works. A bit of Flash animation in a part of the page can give a sparkle and draw attention to a certain area, but in my opinion that is as much as it should be used for. You don?t see the big successful sites overly use Flash. Too much Flash is expensive and usually unnecessary.

Web developer
Developers are responsible for the following vital website components.

Your developer will make sure page transitions are very smooth, i.e. menus remain in the same place, the headers and footers are stable throughout. This gives the impression of a solid structure and develops confidence.

Fast loading speeds. All aspects of the site should be designed to be lightweight so load quickly. Pictures should be compressed yet not pixelated as this looks awful.

Your website should work on the main search engines; certainly Internet Explorer and Mozilla Firefox. Net Applications say that Internet Explorer has 84% market share and Mozilla has 11%. The only other one that I would suggest is worth looking at is Safari, the Apple browser with 3% share. Each has it?s own way of interpreting the website code. If you have a PC you can download Mozilla free, maybe worth trying your website on it (I actually prefer it to the Microsoft product anyway).

Ecommerce engine
So, your web designer has done a good job. You have a customer on your site, they have found an item they like and progress to buy. At this point customers are looking for assurance. They are about to enter their personal details and pay money for something without really knowing who they are buying from. The more you can do to re-assure the better. Your shopping basket has to apply the QRS; Quick, Reassure, Secure. Be quick, offer postcode lookup so customers don?t have to spend a long time filling out details. Reassure at every step offering clear guidance on what to do. And don?t just be secure, communicate that you are secure. Do your utmost to convince the customer they are making the right buying decision, don?t let any unnecessary barriers get in the way. You wouldn?t allow that to happen in your shop would you? Next time you buy something online make a note of anything that reduces your level of comfort and check your own site doesn?t do something similar.

So, these are the traits of your website creation team. Once your website is up and running you then have the ongoing aspects to consider, a different set of skills are required here. In Part 2 we will look at fulfilment and the important issue of cognitive dissonance plus website marketers, those people who can help drive customers to your site.

Further information
David Mackley MBA BSc is MD of Intelligent Retail which produces Giftware Connect, offering fresh ideas on running your business with the help of simple technology. He can be contacted on 01635 262 718. Giftware Connect: Beyond EPoS. Access www.intelligentretail.co.uk to find out more.

September/October 2010
issue 61
available now