Know-How Exchange : Website Critique

Jeff,

I'm not an accountant, but from what I can easily find on your site, I don't find a clear understanding of what it is you want me to buy. You tell me what your product does but you don't clearly tell me what it is. Is it a software package? Is it a SaaS? In order to find that out I needed to click the "sign up" button and you give me no real motivating reason to do that. Your demos are fast moving videos with apparently no sound, so again it was hard for me to understand how things work.

I would want the ability to actually try the calculators with a live sample. I would want to know if it is easy or difficult to use. I would want to see an actual sample of what data I would receive. I'll take a wild guess and say your calculators work, but how do I know that?

Prove to me that using your service will make my job easier, save me time and give me greater productivity.

The site is very appealing but it needs content work to sell your products/services.

I hope this helps.

Paul

If you are not using landing pages, that's your problem. Whatever you promise that gets your target audience to click, you're not paying it off immediately and directly when they land on your site.

You need a post-click marketing strategy to convert some of those clickers. You want to let people know after they click through that you know where they came from, what they expect, and how they can collect the prize.

Check out this free MarketingProfs seminar:

High-Performance Landing Pages that Boost Your Bottom Line

The seminar will explain the approach in enough detail that you can decide if you agree with my diagnosis.

Let us know if this solves the problem for you.

Dear Jeff,

Your main sticking point for the eye is the top left corner of your main page, just below your logo, in which there's the following:

Get Started
View Calculation Demo
View Research Demo

And? What am I, as you accountant visitor, getting started IN? Answer: zip. There's nothing in this key space that telegraphs KEY BENEFITS.

You don't tell me what your site is ABOUT. This means I'm instantly bored and GONE!

This link, although it's from 2006 is still valid. It shows heat mapping of website content. The human eye tracks certain areas of EVERY webpage and if your critical information is outside certain areas of a critical shape, visually, you're screwed:

www.useit.com/alertbox/reading_pattern.html

Short and sweet, but I hope this helps. Good luck to you.

Gary Bloomer
Wilmington, DE, USA

Jeff,
This certainly is not a major issue, but under the "about" section it says "New for 2009". That could lead people to believe you're not up to date.

Michael

Hi, jeffhechler

I will give you some suggestions from the design, logic, and usability points of view.


Here are some design mistakes:

- General impression of your website home page: distracting. Font inconsistency. This is what strikes my eye immediately: there are few fonts used on your website – I have counted at least 5 – which are slightly to significantly different from each other. There only maximum of 2 different fonts acceptable in any graphic project: header font could be different from the text font. Also, there could be used the third font, but only in the logo.
- Logo kerning is very tight, don’t try to fit it, make it a bit longer, but easily readable, besides, it’s just not looking good then you try to squeeze a long word inside a small space.
- Copy leading is too small: makes it hardly readable. Some places of the site make an impression that you pay for hosting (or design) per square inch: everything is so tight – leading in the list, space between sub headers and text; the other spots make you think that you had too much space – “Get Started, View Calculation Demo, View Research Demo” block, for example.
- Main image on the page is of very low quality, icons are not consistent
- Menu background goes from cool palette to warm – that is not very appealing gradient, and the way it’s breaking in two colors in the middle is kind of crossing the menu over.
- Why There is more space between Get Started and View Calculation Demo, View Research Demo
- On the content pages - About US, IAS Products, FAQs – left indentation is of different size. You should either have same size indentation for each page or rather have no indentation, because it’s absolutely illogical: there is nothing in the left column on those pages, besides, on Take a look and Get started pages there is no indentation at all, and, perhaps, there should not be, so, keep it consistent.
- While you overpowered home page with different graphic spots, bad imagery, inconsistent icons, you definitely underdid it on Overview and Products page, you need some kind of icons or images on Products page, and you need some kind of graphs on Overview page.

Logic/Usability mistakes:

- Top part of your site has some call to action – this is correct spot for call to action blocks, but you start calling to action before you actually explained what visitors should act about. Try to see it in the first time visitor’s eyes. When they look at the home page they see the following in this sequence: Cost basis – Calculation Research – Tell me more! - The IAS Difference – Subscribe now! – Tax Preparers & Investors - Get Started - View Calculation Demo - View Research Demo. There is an elderly woman on the image, so the idea I get from the visual on your page is: it’s some kind of tax preparation service for elderly people. Not sure what I may/have to subscribe to… You totally confuse the visitor! Besides, you have two (!!!) Get started on the page. You should not leave customer a choice – to take a look, get started, for get started again. They would rather close the browser window.
- What is the difference between Take a look and Get Started? Why these two sections can’t be merged in one? I see no point of separating them. Frankly, it feels like you need to seriously rethink the content structure of the website, because there is little logic in how you presented it. If we take existing sections, the top menu should have looked this way: Services and Products (home page) – Get Started – About Us – Contact Us. Bottom menu would look like this: Services and Products (home page) – Get Started – Sign Up - Sign In - FAQs - Privacy Policy – Help - About Us – Contact Us. You really don’t need much in the top menu, and you don’t need two bottom menus either.
- Take a look link in top menu goes to two different places from different pages. From About us page it likns to calc_demo.htm, from Get started page it links to overview.htm
- Top Sign in/ Sign up buttons are really useless. When you click Sign up - you get to the Calculator Demonstration page, and there is no way to sign up there. By clicking Sign In you are transferred to a blank page with a small login/password window. You have so much space above the menu there; there is nothing that can prevent you from placing small login/password form in one line there.

Whatever happens
Good luck!
Natasha Chernyavskaya
Artographica
Los Angeles, CA

A few fast suggestions and some comments that I think will help.

Your home page is a bit cluttered and has no logical flow. Lead with a concise statement that clearly communicates the problem that you solve. You have a lot of buttons that mean nothing. “Get Started,” started at what? “Subscribe Now,” subscribe to what? Also, it is not clear what someone can click on and what they can’t until you roll-over everything (I think the Family Tree has no link). Btw, I like the demo although I couldn’t hear any audio.

In addition to communicating better, you can help people get over their lack of trust in an unknown entity (you) by doing some of the following; offer a trial period or free usage, then focus on converting people to long term clients (I see you offer this at the end of the demo – put it out front on the home page); offer a money-back guarantee if people are not satisfied for any reason - it says a lot about your confidence in your solution and takes the risk out of the equation (except for their lost time); offer customer testimonials and endorsements.

It looks like a great solution – good luck, John

I am with the others - I opened your page and wasn't sure what you were selling and to who. That should be very obvious to anyone within seconds of seeing a web page.

There are many ways to do this, ranging from simple additions to total page redesigns. Sticking to just a simple suggestion, you could add a tag line (which you would post under your name on the web site, along with add as <title> tag so it shows up as this description in search engines and similar. My suggestion for a tag line is:
"Cost basis calculators that allow tax and investment professionals save time, money and effort. "

Based on your analytics, are you seeing people go to your "sign up" page and not following through or are you not seeing click thrus to the "sign up" page at all?

If the former, then the problem is that you're asking people to part with their $ without giving them a sampler/concrete taste of your offering. They were interested enough in your offering, but weren't yet ready to pay for your services. Perhaps the first step is signing them up for a free monthly newsletter full of tips for tax preparers/investors. Each issue can further cement your value to them.

If the latter, then the problem is that you haven't sold them OR they haven't figured out there's a place to click for more info. The "Tell Me More" button is much more prominent and doesn't naturally lead at the end of the page to the subscribe page.