7 Questions to Ask in Testing Your Website's Effectiveness
by Nancy J. Wagner

Whether you've just built your first website or have had one for years, periodically testing it for effectiveness is critical to maintaining a successful, sales-oriented website. Case in point: I recently put four of my carefully-selected website testers to work on an outdoor clothing website. While I hadn't built the site, I had been working with the company to make the website's information and sales process more appealing to the buyer.

Even when I thought the site was completely ready, the testers, who had never been to the site before, found several important things that needed improvement. Wow! This again confirmed my belief that after you've looked at your site for awhile, it gets difficult to objectively evaluate it. Would you like to have your site tested? Call me, and we'll put my team of testers to work to find out how effective your website is. Or, use this basic list of 7 questions to get a few people to tell you what they think about your website.

1. Explain what objective you want your testers to achieve on your site. If you sell services, this will be to get to the point where they would call or email you for more info. If you sell products, have your testers purchase one of your products. Just make sure your testers know what "role" they need to play as a potential buyer who is visiting your site. Then ask them the next few questions.

2. Did you find the appropriate product or service information quickly?

3. Was there enough info to make you feel confident in buying from this site? Or, if this was a service site, would you have called or emailed the company for more information about their offerings?

4. Were you able to find the order page quickly? Was it clear to you what you needed to do to start placing your order? If potentially buying services, did you find the contact info quickly?

5. How was your shopping cart experience? Was there anything you'd change during the process? Did it feel secure? Did you experience any frustration?

6. Would you have provided your email address to this site so you could be on their mailing list even if you were NOT buying anything? Yes or No (Only ask this question if you offer an opt-in e-mail sign up box on your website.)

7. What did you like or dislike in regards to graphics, the layout of the site, the writing, etc.?

These are just a few of the questions my testers use to evaluate your website. Service websites delve into different sets of issues than product websites. Either way, finding out a potential buyer's experience and paying close attention to their comments could make all the difference in how future prospects complete (or don't complete!) the sales process. And when it comes to websites, getting buyers to buy or make that call is what counts most!

Click here to start dialog about how we can help test your website's effectiveness.