1. My website is a dog’s breakfast, my boss wants it fixed, what do I need to do/think about mys elf before I contact a company?
2. What are the most common mistakes you see being made on organisation’s website?
3. How do you measure value for money on your website?

1. My website is a dog’s breakfast, my boss wants it fixed, what do I need to do/think about myself before I contract a company?

It’s important to realise that a web development company won’t know as much about your organisation and website as you do.

• You need to be the expert on your website.
• To get the result you want, you will need to fill them in with all the information they will need.
  • This is the brief for the project.
• A good brief will stop wasted effort and money from people going down the wrong track and ensure you get the result you need.

High level questions you should be able to answer are about how you define your website. These include:

• What is the purpose of the website?
  • Why have we got a website in the first place?
• What do we hope to develop with our internet presence? For example,
  • Customer or client education
  • Internal communication
  • Information gathering
  • Information dissemination
  • Sales
• Who is our target audience?
  • What do we want them to get from the website?
  • What do we want to get from them?
• What image do we want to portray on the Internet?
  • Do we have corporate branding standards which need to be complied with?
• Who owns the website?
  • Which person in the organisation is responsible for ensuring the website is up to date and loved.

Then on to fixing the dog’s breakfast.

• What is the scope of the project?
  • What exactly does your boss mean by fixing the dog’s breakfast?
  • Does the boss want a total website redevelopment along with a new design or some changes made to the existing site?
• What are the goals of this project?
  • e.g., to fix the dog’ s breakfast so we get less complaints about the site and more registrations for courses.
• What kind of budget have you got?
• What outcome will make this project successful?
  • This should be the goal for the project
• How will we measure success?
  • More sales
  • more email inquiries
  • more site visits
  • less complaints

You should be able to determine the measures of success against the website’s broad purpose and the goals for this project.

Armed with this information you will be able to give a brief to the contractor which lead to an excellent outcome.

2. What are the most common mistakes you see being made on organisation’s website?

Out of date content.

• This is often a symptom of no company ownership of the site.
• Because no-one owns it, no-one has the responsibility of keeping it up to date.

Broken links

It’s hard to find information on the site

• Poor navigation
  • Links aren’t obvious
  • I include flash menus and some dropdown navigation systems in this.
• Poor search engine results
  • page titles, meta information
• Hard to read content
  • Overly wordy and long pages.
    • People don’t read, they scan.
    • So 7 plus or minus 2 words for sentences, get to the point quickly.
      • Use bullets
      • Use white space
  • Headings should summarise the page

Slow loading pages.

• pointless animations
• flash

3. How do you measure value for money on your website?

How do I measure if my website project gave me value for money?

This is the ROI or “Return on investment”. It should be directly related to how you have defined the site’s purpose and objectives.

With the purpose and objectives for the site in mind, you can set up measures of how your website meets it’s goals. For example, if a goal for a website change was to have increased number of applicants for a course, you could measure the number of applications made on-line. Of course, the number of new applicants may be greater than that because some people will be attracted to the course by the information on the website and apply for the course in person, over the phone or by snail mail

Easily measurable items to assess ROI:

• Sales – $
  • If you’re doing online sales
• Leads – for sales or services
  • emails, contacts
• Conversions – how many people visit your site and do something
  • you want people to join, participate in a survey, recommend your site or simply subscribe to your email newsletter?

From your website logs you can get indirect measures such as:

• Usability
  • How usable is your site to your visitors
    • From your website logs you can get information on
      • returning visitors
      • page views per visit
      • time on page
      • time on site
• SEO
  • How much does Google love your site?
    • is it visiting regularly?
    • how many pages is it spidering

And finally:

• Social Media
  • What your users like and what they actually say about you.

And for buttons in tables there’s this:
http://jehiah.com/archive/button-width-in-ie-revised

I found this article on Dealing with the horror of Winmail.dat to be a really helpful guide on how to integrate Fentun with Thunderbird. The author reckons it works fine in WinMe and WinXP. There is a Linux version of Fentun so it may well work for that too.