We’ve just released a new version of our website (we’re mobile friendly!) so a few lessons are fresh in our minds. Hopefully, you’ll learn something that can help you create or recreate the perfect website for your beauty business.
1. Know what Matters
Everything stems from knowing what features and functions you need. Of course, you want it all, but realistically, you’ll need to identify and stack rank features and functions from Must Have to Like to Have to Nice to Have. Be ruthless, but smart about it. Integration with a payment system is absolutely a must-have, but is having a mobile friendly site equally as necessary? Only you can know that based on your sales plan. As you stack rank, you’ll also want to think in terms of what product managers call minimally marketable product. What this means is that you don’t (and shouldn’t) do everything at once. Put out a website that meets your minimally marketable feature set– make sure your must-haves add up to a viable website, and then add follow on releases to get the bells and whistle features that will complete your ideal website.
Research your competitors and the different shopping platforms available to create your list. Shopify, BigCommerce, Volusion, and Square Space are a few options out on the market. Each has strengths and weaknesses and depending on the volume you plan to sell through your site, and the integrated marketing features you want, you’ll be able to assess your requirements and can then work to find the technology that best fits your needs.
For our own new release, we know that the most important reason for the upgrade was to make our site truly mobile-friendly. We wanted a responsive design to serve our mobile customers. So our stack-ranking looked something like this:
- True responsive design for a mobile-friendly website for phones and tablets
- Integration with our payment processor and accounting system
- Ability to move all customer data forward into the new system
- Ability to customize the look and feel
- Web-based backend management panel
- Loyalty program (we have one and wanted to carry the reward points forward)
- Ability to optimize for SEO
- Ability to integrate with our email marketing platform
2. Choose Your Partner Carefully
Ultimately, the success of your website will depend on the partners you chose to build and maintain it. If you have a complicated integration with other applications, for instance, your back office payment processing system, inventory system, or third-party marketing platforms, those integrations will be critical for your success. The partner you chose must be able to handle your design constraints as well as your technical constraints. Ask for references, find and engage with online user groups for that platform, search online for negative reviews (and positive ones). Ask the hard questions. If the partner hasn’t done a project like yours, be willing to wait while they build what you need, or chose a different partner. Technology is always easy until you actually have to code it! Like your feature set, stack rank what’s important to you in your technology partner.
3. Involve the Team
Your website is your primary customer-facing communication vehicle where you’ll build your brand, tell your story, and earn customers. Involve key members from different parts of your organization to be sure you are getting good input from customer service, finance, operations, sales, and of course, marketing. As you gather input, be sure to stack-rank them! Involving the team early will also give you a set of people to help test the website both before and after release.
One word of caution: avoid scope creep! Be ruthless about what you need and what is nice to have. Think about the features and functions that will separate you from the competition and will help you tell your story. Making sure the backoffice team has what they need, too, will keep your operation running smoothly. But … when you have a lot of people giving input, you can get what I call scope creep and your project can get too big for you to effectively handle.
4. SEO
If you aren’t already managing your search engine rankings, now is a great time to get started. Google accounts for more traffic to more sites than any other source, and paid search engine traffic will only get you so far. Organic traffic tends to be much more valuable and, it’s free! I strongly recommend working with a reputable search engine marketing company or hiring someone in house to do that for you, depending on your goals and budget. Anytime you release a new site, whether on the same domain and with the same category structure, you risk jeopardizing your search engine rankings. Work carefully with your technical team to ensure all redirects are working correctly, and that your SEO optimization is reviewed. To learn more about SEO, check out Moz. They have great tools, a great library of information and a great team.
5. Take Time to Do it Right
Once you decide to update your website, be patient. It takes time to work out your overall design and usability, write copy, and code. You’ll also want to be reviewing your business rules so that the new website will support your workflow. Budget enough time and then budget some more. You will also hit snags and while you can and should move fast in today’s fast-paced e-commerce world, give yourself and your team enough time to deal with the issues along the way. Don’t get too frustrated if your date slips. It’s technology and that is just going to happen.
6. Project Managers are a Must-Have
Without a project manager, projects creep, lag, and fall flat. If you want your website to represent you as best as it can, assign or hire someone to manage the project to the right scope, cost, and timeline. The expense is worth it as you’ll bring the project in faster and you’ll have a better chance of getting the site you want. You’ll need someone who can navigate all the different systems, vendors, and team members and can talk tech and marketing speak.
7. Usability/UI
If you’ve ever been to a website that you can’t figure out, you’ve been to a poorly designed website. It may look beautiful, but if it isn’t intuitive and logical, your customers will stop buying and stop coming. Think about Amazon’s website. It’s not pretty, but it’s darn effective and you can navigate it and shop from it with ease. Developing a usable, engaging user interface (UI) is work. User-centered design is an evidence-based approach to creating a functional UI. Usability experts, the Nielson Norman Group put it this way:
On the Web, usability is a necessary condition for survival. If a website is difficult to use, people leave. If the homepage fails to clearly state what a company offers and what users can do on the site, people leave. If users get lost on a website, they leave. If a website’s information is hard to read or doesn’t answer users’ key questions, they leave. Note a pattern here? There’s no such thing as a user reading a website manual or otherwise spending much time trying to figure out an interface. There are plenty of other websites available; leaving is the first line of defense when users encounter a difficulty.
Even with a small budget, you can do usability testing by putting people unfamiliar with your website in front of it and ask them to complete some basic tasks: search, create an account, add items to cart, check out, etc. By watching what they do and how they navigate, you’ll begin to see what’s working and what isn’t. Remember you are not the target audience, so finding time to get feedback early in the design process is critical.
8. Testing
Before you release your website: test, test, test. See your website on multiple platforms– phones, tablets, desktops, and operating systems, Windows, Mac, Android, etc. Create a list of everything your customers do on your website and test it on all devices to ensure the site works for everyone who visits. If you have an active social media following, testing on mobile devices is critical. Don’t just make sure the site is responsive (meaning it adjusts to the size of the screen), but test out what it’s like to place an order or send a customer support email.
Once you go live, keep testing. Go through your entire checklist again and make sure everything moved from staging to production as expected.
We hope you learn something from our lessons, and remember to be patient when it comes to launching your new website. After all, ever-changing technology and a growing business means your website work will never really be finished. There will always be room for improvement and updating along the way.
Has your company gone through a website design or redesign? Care to share any lessons you’ve learned in the comments below?
