7 Debilitating Diseases of Business Websites (and their cures)

by Dr. Ralph F. Wilson
Web Marketing Today, Issue 41, February 1, 1998

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You go to work before you're over the flu. But try as you will, the disease still takes its toll on your productivity. Illnesses make websites inefficient, too.

If you're a site doctor like me, you see a lot of sick websites on the Net. Yes, they work, but even when sites are treated with massive doses of cold medicine, visitors quickly see symptoms that make them want to back away. Most of these problems are design flaws: not mediocre graphics, but basic flaws in the planning and execution of the site itself.

Here are some diseases I detect as I browse hundreds of business websites each month.

1. Clarity Constriction

You'd be amazed at the number of sites that don't tell you exactly what kind of business they're in. I look at the home page and maybe scan an "About the Company" page in vain, looking for a simple, clear statement describing the business. Don't use complicated words when simple words will do. Just tell us plainly.

How do I place an order? Since there's no clerk to guide me, make sure explanations are crystal clear. What if I want to contact you? Is there a telephone number? An e-mail address? Too often, people afraid of too many responses make it very clear that they only want to tell you about themselves. They don't want questions or inquiries, since they aren't really staffed to do business -- with you, anyway.

To heal Clarity Constriction ask a real Internet novice to log onto your website, with you looking over their shoulder. Take careful notes. What do they have trouble with? What questions do they ask? Make some corrections based on this session, and then repeat with another newbie until you get it simple to understand. This disease is easily curable, but untreated is a silent sales killer; many prospective customers will never go beyond your front page.

2. Image Inflammation

You land on a site, and wait for minutes for the site to load fully. You twiddle your fingers, your hourglass fills and turns over and fills again. Finally the whole page and each of the graphics is downloaded. Why did it take so long? The three most common reasons are:

• Internet Indigestion, where one of the Internet backbone computers between you and the website host is slow. You can diagnose this by using a program such as tracert (see sidebar).
• Server Seizure, where your Web hosting service computer is running slowly, a condition hard to diagnose and difficult to control (unless you own the computer).
• Image Inflammation, however, is something you can directly control.

Image Inflammation is a disease that especially attacks graphic designers in larger Web design shops, advertising firms, and corporations that have high-speed connections to the Internet. These designers create wonderfully complex, large graphics, and naturally desire to show them off. The client smiles as the demo loads fast on the high-speed system, but for a home or office with a 28.8K dial-up modem, the graphic may take forever to download.

Recently I visited

• A soccer store with a 102K animated GIF on its very first page (a very attractive image, I might add)
• A safety products site with a large Java applet on the front page
• A sleeping products merchant who made me wait until I could watch his 111K spinning globe before I was permitted to see his mattresses.

My rule of thumb is to make the total graphics and text load for any single Web page no more than 50K to 60K, preferably less. On a heavy Internet day, pages smaller than this 50K standard will be much appreciated. This is how you count it, using typical sizes.

HTML page text (text doesn't take much room)	5K
Background image	5K
Masthead or top-of-page graphic with company logo	20K
Navigation Bar	8K
8 Navigation buttons at 2K each	16K
2 Award logos at 5K each	10K
TOTAL	64K

Fortunately, when a Web browser has once "seen" a graphic, it is cached (stored in your computer's memory) so the next page that calls for that image doesn't have to download it again. If you know where a visitor is likely to enter the site, you can plan larger images later in his path, since you don't have to count cached images twice.

To measure the graphic and text load yourself, save the page and each graphic to your hard disk (right click with your mouse on a PC), and then add up the total.

Cure: Insist that your website designer give you a graphics and text load for the pages which download the slowest, and compare it against our rule of thumb. Make your graphics work hard for you. Don't just add something because it looks "cool." It must serve an important purpose or it should be deleted. Exception: When you tell the Web visitor ahead of time that the image will be 150K, then she is choosing to wait while it is downloaded.

3. Monitor Myopia

Here's another designer disease that's hard to self-diagnose. Most designers work in front of a computer eight hours a day, and often purchase 17- or 19-inch monitors to make life easier. They configure their monitors to 800 x 600 pixel resolution and are as happy as clams. But the average monitor size sold to the general public is 14 inches, where the legibility of an 800 x 600 resolution is often marginal, so many of these average users set their monitors to 640 x 480 pixels. Designers are usually years away from their first 14-inch monitor, and have forgotten what it's like. An increasing number of websites are being designed cavalierly for 800 x 600 resolution, forcing the many, many 640 x 480 users to scroll to the right to see the full text, and maybe just click and leave in frustration. Monitor myopia is often dismissed with a wave of the hand: "All our prime customers have larger monitors."

The cure (and the universal practice of the best designers and highest traffic websites) is to design for 640 x 480. It's a mistake for designers to guess at this from an 800 x 600 monitor. Designers, reset your screen resolution temporarily to 640 x 480 and open the site in a browser so you can see what the rest of the world is seeing. The usable width (after you subtract for the browser scroll bar) is 596 to 600 pixels.

4. Frames Fixation

If you think Myopic Monitor sites are ill, they get really sick when you add Frames Fixation Syndrome. Netscape 2.0 introduced frames, and soon frames were the rage. Upon reflection, most careful designers now avoid them in nearly all circumstances for these reasons:

• Frames (especially when designed for 800 x 600 monitors) tend to cut up the screen into windows that require excessive vertical scrolling to read the text.
• Frames that require ugly gray scroll-bars, look, well ... ugly.
• Frames do not always print out correctly on some browsers.
• Frames cannot be bookmarked easily for future reference, or for linking in resources such our Web Marketing Info Center and Electronic Commerce Research Room. When only the content frame is linked, the navigation devices, company logo, and banner ads are sometimes absent.
• Frames are resented when siteowners use them to link to and to frame external sites. This is the sort of anger that spawns lawsuits.
• Frame content is often skipped when search engine "spiders" come to call. Use of NOFRAME tags and redundant links take care of this -- most of the time.

The cure? Use frames only as a last resort. Frames, for example, help people browse our extensive Web Marketing and Online Sales Bookstores and purchase books through our association with Amazon Books without fully leaving our list of books and book recommendations. We've also used frames to present a categorized directory of dealers or periodicals or the like -- a flat database.

5. Background Blemish

Happily, Background Blemish is starting to clear up across the Web as designers are abandoning background textures and patterns, and rediscovering that white or off-white is usually the best background for text readability and to make graphics pop out. We commonly use a band of color and pattern along the left side of a Web page, often in conjunction with a navigation system. Simpler is better for both readability as well as download time. Hint: use both the BACKGROUND and BGCOLOR parameters in the BODY tag so that the visitor doesn't have to see ugly gray while the background image is loading.

A close cousin to Background Blemish is Color Confusion. Novices (and occasionally professionals) sometimes reverse colors, using dark backgrounds with light letters. While dramatic, light on dark is quite hard to read. It also makes the page unprintable on your visitor's printer. Colored table cells in forms make for an attractive design, a bug in some browsers causes the background color to fill in the entire field when your visitor uses her back key to return to a form, making the form impossible to fill out.

With background colors and textures, err on the side of simplicity, and your site will start to get healthier right away.

6. Button Bloat

I am amazed at how many large sites make you wait while 15 individual buttons download, rather than a single navigation bar or clickable image map. The time it takes your browser to call for and download 15 small images is much longer than to download one image that equals their total surface area. Besides, many buttons are bigger and bolder than good design would dictate. In defense of buttons, I must agree that when ALT tags are used under every button. a site is much easier to navigate with someone decides to surf with "autoload images off." But it may be too high a price to pay. I suggest a combination of hyperlinks and image maps.

7. Navigation Neuralgia

Navigation Neuralgia has nothing to do with too many buttons. It's not knowing where to go to find out the information you need. This pain may come from too many top-level choices -- or too few. Sometimes website structure is more related to a business's internal departmental organization than it is to fulfilling customer needs. Instead of asking, "How can I present all the information I want to?" ask "What does my average customer want to know when he first comes to my site?" Navigation should be designed from the customer's perspective. If the average visitor comes to shop, don't hide the entrance to your store. If she comes for technical information, make your FAQ and knowledge base easily accessible. Most people don't want to know "About the Company" until they know what you have to offer. Only then do they care to learn more about your officers or business philosophy.

Provide as many alternate ways to navigate your site as necessary. Buttons, image maps, hyperlinks, search engines, and drop-down menu systems all can contribute to overall user friendliness when used appropriately. The larger the site, the more alternative navigation systems you may need.

Be aware, however, that curing Navigation Neuralgia may require an entire site redesign. Since navigation is built into every Web page, every Web page will need to be altered to correct systemic problems such as this. It is cost-effective from the very beginning to use a designer thoroughly acquainted with navigation problems, especially if you anticipate a large site.

Is your site sick? So long as your competitors' sites are in bed with the flu, it doesn't matter much. Just make sure yours gets well quicker.

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Sidebar: Use Trace Route to Find the Slow Points

When a site takes forever to download, the problem may be with the Internet rather than the site itself. With Windows 95, connect to the Internet, select the DOS prompt, and type in

tracert www.wilsonweb.com

You can watch as the program checks each link and records the time at each point on its journey to the target site. It'll help you pinpoint the slowest links. For Unix workstations use the native "traceroute" function.