Test the Experience for Successful Websites

You can gain valuable insights into your own design with in-house testing.

Recommendations

Apply the following recommendations to ensure that you're keeping track of the customer experience:

• Understand that no design is perfect the first time.
• Test your own site with real customers.
• Test your site against competitor websites.
• The web yourself for real tasks. Buy half of your gifts online for the next holiday season, and observe how other sites make it easy or difficult for you to buy from them.

Test early and test often. After you've tested, test again at planned intervals. Customer habits change, products change, and the marketplaces change. Routine testing should be built into the website schedules.

Recommendations for Successful Websites

The following recommendations will help you meet the requirements and demands of a successful website.

• Plan: Always have the capacity for twice your current volume.
• Realize: Traffic can grow by several hundred percent after a big campaign.
• Remember: Anybody you turn away will not return.
• Start Out Right: Don't run a big campaign with a bad web design. Fix the site first.

The above rules are minimum standards, requirements, and current customer expectations. Periodic reviews and affirmations keep these rules in the forefront. Share these rules with others in the organization as business online basics.

The rules are fundamentals in guiding decisions or features of a website. Content of a page is a major contributor to the customer experience.