Get Your Website Right | BTalk Australia

Your website is likely to be playing an increasingly important part in your business, so it’s important to get it right.

Today on BTalk Australia Phil Dobbie talks to Tony Redhead of Red Square Productions about how to build a website that works.

Click on “Play” above to hear the podcast.

Add your thoughts and comments by clicking “Participate” at the bottom of this post.

See also: The Mysterious Art of Search Engine Optimisation

• Today’s Transcript

Dobbie: Hello I’m Phil Dobbie.  Today on BTalk, what makes a really good website? A website sells your products, answers customer queries and promotes your brand. It has a lot to do.  How does it manage to do all that? I’m joined by Red Square’s director, founder, creative director Tony Redhead.  Tony and I worked together on a design project for Telstra a few years ago. And I thought we should get him on because he’s the only person who’s actually said anything nice about me on LinkedIn. Hello. Tony.

Redhead: Hi Phil, how’re you doing?

Dobbie: Now, where should you start when you’re building a website?

Redhead: The basic thing you’ve got to consider is what’s the person coming to that website want to achieve? If you can fulfil their expectation and allow them to achieve what they want to achieve, you know, whether it’s getting some information, buying a product, or anything else like that, as long as they can achieve that goal you’ve succeeded. Now, that may be totally different than what their client wants you to do.

Dobbie: Yeah.

Redhead: And in nine times out of 10 cases it is totally different because a client has an opinion of what they want. But that’s the thing you’ve really got to drill down to and you’ve got to find that thing is, what does the person coming to that sight want to achieve.

Dobbie: Now how did you cope with change because that might change over time, of course, particularly, you know, someone coming for a second or third time might want to do something different to when they came to the sight the first time.

Redhead: Sure.

Dobbie: And your business might change as well and you don’t want to keep on redesigning your website. There’s got to be a foundation element so your site looks the same over a period of time.

Redhead: Well to a certain extent you have to keep redesigning your site. And that’s probably one of the most difficult things, you know, from a developer’s point of view with dealing with sites is the constant maintaining of them or updating of them. We just are redeveloping a website for city Commission exhibition centre there that we built about four years ago. And it’s exactly that same proposition that you’re talking about. Four years ago we went out and interviewed their clients to find out what they wanted. Four years later, you know, we’ve gone out and done the same thing again.

Dobbie: Right, and is that because people’s use of the web is changing generally?

Redhead: Well, yes, that’s it, it’s you know in four years there’s been a dramatic change. And probably the most dramatic change is the increase of the bandwidth availability. So in the past where you were hindered a lot by the multimedia for the amount of space you could use, a lot of those restrictions have disappeared now.

Dobbie: Tony, do you think multimedia is important now then, too, so your website looks, you know, exciting and dynamic.

Redhead: I tell you video that’s about all I do these days. Nintey percent of my work that I’m building and creating and putting out now are video based websites. In fact, I launched three video websites last week.

Dobbie: And what about the depth of content? I mean I know it seems to me the more content you have the more likely you’re going to get picked up by a search engine. Is it important to have a deep site?

Redhead: Well, it’s you know search engines, you know, when we talk about search engines we talk about Google, which is …

Dobbie: Mmm, 90 percent of it.

Redhead: … probably the one, and that’s really like you know, a lot of the stuff are for getting ranking in Google is based upon linking people to you from other sites. So the thing is if your information’s broad enough in its appeal then other people who are linked through to you. So, then you’ll get a much higher ranking. But, you know, content on a website is incredibly important, you know, if you want people to keep coming back.

Dobbie: You’ve got to tell them something new every time.

Redhead: Yes, you’ve got to have that information to be refreshed, it’s got to be up-to-date, it’s got to be topical, you know, or nobody’s going to come back you know, it’d be like a podcast, you know, people may come to it the first time but you know they’re not going to come back and listen to it four times over. You know, they want something fresh every time.

Dobbie: Every day?

Redhead: Every day.

Dobbie: In the case of BTalk.  So what about fatal mistakes that people make on websites?

Redhead: Not finishing it.

Dobbie: Right.

Redhead: That’s probably the biggest thing. You know, people come in with the really good ideas and they get to a point and it’s just, you know, you get to those little things that really frustrate you that are so easy to finish, but people don’t do it. Like, for instance, you go to a website, you click on a link. The next thing you know you’re downloading a 20-megabyte PDF file.

Dobbie: Yeah.

Redhead: But they don’t tell you and it could be so simple. It could be that, you know, the link name and then just after it you know PDF and the size of it.

Dobbie: Right.

Redhead: You know, how many times have you done that? And that annoys the hell out of me.

Dobbie: And when you say not finishing you’re also talking about presumably things like those pages you go to where it says “under construction” and you go.

Redhead: Oh, I never use that.

Dobbie: Yes, and you go back in six months time and it still says “under construction”.

Redhead: Yeah, that’s the worst thing, if you haven’t got anything to put there, don’t put it.

Dobbie: Yeah.

Redhead: You know, you’re better to have a little bit of quality information than a massive like nothing at all. And it’s really that finish that people get to and that’s the hard part from a developer’s point of view because there’s so much of it to be done. But really, if you can make that experience really good, you know, and simple things like you know, if you click on a picture and there’s the opportunity. You know, there is other pictures available. You’re giving that person the ability to click through to another picture without having to close that window and opening another window. Things like if you’re using Flash, give people a way to sort of navigate before the Flash is finished loading. You know, so a few years ago you’ve got a large Flash presentation in the page and you’ve got other menus, allow those menus to operate over the top of Flash.

Dobbie: Right. So, the order in which a page downloads is important in that case.

Redhead: Yeah, well it’s a bit hard to actually make it download in a specific order. But the thing is as long as, you know, if you’re doing something give people an alternate way to move through the site to get the information. Don’t force them to, you know, click on, skip this file or what have you.  You know, give them alternative navigation. It takes a little bit more work to build the page but in the end, you know, it does work. Like for instance, if you go to the Panasonic website, you know, we have a large Flash presentation in there. But there are HTML drop-down menus that operate over the top of it.

Dobbie: So how are people navigating around sites?  Is it still pretty much the menus that they’re seeing on the page or are people clicking in the contents, sort of like the main body content within the site?

Redhead: Ah, no, the main navigation is still the primary method of moving through the site.

Dobbie: Right.

Redhead: Yeah, I think, you know, the thing is once you start to use content management systems and dynamic content that let you generate content, then what you can start to do inside contenting pages you can start to make contextual links so that if somebody, for instance, goes to, you know, once again on the Panasonic website if somebody goes to look at a product, you know, we source other products that people have seen that are related. So, you’ll go and look at a camera and somebody maybe looking at camera accessories.  So, you know you’ve got these, you know, serendipity links inside it. But I think that that was a word that you used a lot in the project we were working on.

Dobbie: Serendip…, I can’t even say it.

Redhead: But that’s it, as long as those links, you know, inside the content are relevant …

Dobbie: Yeah.

Redhead: … to what you’re doing, it’s like if there is a link that takes you out to something completely different, you know. That’s not a good idea.

Dobbie: Now, there’s a lot of open source around these days. Does that mean that people like you are needed less and people like me can really botch up a website all by themselves? And botch is probably the right word to use.

Redhead: Well, you know, from our point of view as a business, you know, the tools that we use are all, primarily from Adobe now when you’re having purchased pretty much everybody who’s out there, all those tools sort of fall under one name Adobe. We use, you know, software that we buy only because from our point of view it gives us access to developers, we have regular updates, our clients like to know that, you know there’s a support mechanism behind it that sometimes you don’t find with open source.

Dobbie: But I mean, the other part of that question is people really working on websites for themselves? I mean how do you get the balance between what’s done in house and what you outsource?

Redhead: The thing about building a website yourself these days it’s not an easy thing for the individual to do because there are so many disciplines involved. You know, you’ve got information architecture, you’ve got usability, you’ve got design, you’ve got interface development, you’ve got application development, you know all of those things. To do it properly you really need skilled people in that area. And from my point of view, you know, I’ve been building websites for 13 years now.  And it’s quite frustrating for me because, you know, 13 years ago we had simple HTML where I could build a website by myself. I didn’t need anybody else. But these days, you know, I need to work with a team of four or five people because they have skills there that I just don’t. So, on one level, yeah, you can go out and build a simple website.  But, if you want to build a proper website that has, you know, dynamic content and has related content that achieves that initial goal that we said right in the very beginning of allowing your visitor to achieve what they want to achieve, you know, it’s a hard thing to build by yourself.

See also: The Mysterious Art of Search Engine Optimisation