You're all too familiar with it: the web site of a big company that is a pain to use. Which unidentifiable picture do you click on? Where amongst all the visual clutter is the link you want? Why must you wait for that long animation to finish before you can even get into the site? These sites are often created on huge budgets, and yet, how do they make you feel? Good about the company, wanting to spend more time at their site? Or frustrated, wanting to move on—probably to a competitor's site—as quickly as possible?
If you're still not convinced that the value we offer will increase your business's bottom line, why not put it to the test? You can try us out by taking advantage of our FREE web consultation offer.
As part of our efforts to help companies get the most out of their web sites, we publish Overture, a free e-mail newsletter aimed at business executives and owners who want to make their companies' web sites as effective as possible. To sign up, visit our Mailing Lists page.
View a sampling of our past web consulting projects.
As a successful business person, you know that a web site is a critical part of marketing and customer relations for any company. But the web is a tough place; if the visitor gets even slightly irritated, they're only a click away from your competitor. Therefore, the primary goals of a web site's design need to be 1) to provide the information visitors want, and 2) to guide visitors to that information as quickly as possible. Those web sites that make you figure out non-standard interfaces and block you from doing what you want until they're ready, severely violate these two primary goals.
Why, then, are such web sites rampant? Simple: most web designers don't understand the rules of the medium. As a result, they unwittingly do things that drive away visitors as soon as those visitors stop looking at the site and start trying to use it. In the end, these web sites are good only for impressing naive clients through inclusion in their designers' portfolios.
A survey of 1,100 Internet users, conducted by Synovate eNation of Chicago in June 2003, showed that a staggering 65 percent of users will not shop on a poorly designed web site, even that of a favorite brand, and that 30 percent of users will cease buying a company's products off-line when the company's web site is poorly designed. These results make it exceedingly clear that web site usability is of paramount importance, and shows that a poorly designed web site can even have a negative impact on traditional sales channels. The survey also found that the most affluent users—those making over $75,000 per year—also have the highest expectations of web sites and are the quickest to abandon a sale when the web site gets in their way.
Our web consultants have been doing advanced, standards-based web development since as far back as 1994. Combined with our broad range of experience and knowledge in such diverse fields as computer science, operations research, marketing, user interface design, and systems analysis, this puts us in a unique position among our competitors to create a web site for your company that is extremely effective and which contributes enough to your bottom line to pay for itself many times over. To accomplish this, our web consultants will do the following:
Throughout the process, our web consultants will keep you informed and involved at every step, and will gladly address any concerns you have. Since we do not charge by the hour or per diem on most projects, but instead give you a flat fee up front, you will not have to worry about budget uncertainties, nor will you have to consider cost before asking us questions along the way. Our goal is to exceed your greatest expectations while creating an effective, user-centric web site that is quantifiably successful.
In addition to consulting on public web sites, our services include planning and building intranet and extranet sites and web-based applications, updating sites to be compliant with current web standards (HTML/XHTML, CSS, etc.), and updating sites for compliance with accessibility requirements (ADA, WCAG). If you have an internal web design team, we are also happy to simply provide independent, professional guidance to ensure that your goals are achieved.