There is a great blog post about how to prioritize website optimization I think all web marketers should read. If you’re a visual person like me, you’ll appreciate how the pyramid digram easily illustrates priority levels for optimization.
I find this topic to be extremely important since many marketing organizations can easily spend most of their time and resources working on initiatives that only impact the persuasion layer of website optimization while functional, usability and intuitive layers get ignored. These layers seem to only be discussed in the context of a site redesigns or CMS implementations. The importance of these layers becomes more diluted when web marketers report only on conversion rates. Managers need to understand how the site is functioning in order to clearly judge how the site, as a whole, is performing.
When was the last time marketing managers spent time asking about 404’s, robots.txt files or page load times? Time spent on creating video testimonials or planning your next podcast series should be a priority only once you can ensure that the back-end of your website is running optimally.
Thinking about this, I wonder how many of us think our sites are optimized while our brands are actually converting site visitors. Why else would they put up with the possibility of confusing navigational titles or that JavaScript form validation code that only works in Firefox? This could very well be the case if your site has poor usability, is inaccessible, or doesn’t comply with w3c standards.
One last thing worth mentioning, even though the functional layer is the most important, it’s also the easiest to diagnose. There are plenty of free on-line tools you can use to judge how well your site is performing from a functional standpoint. It’s well worth taking the time to first know how your users and their browsers handle your site (and fix any functional issues) before you decide to spend your efforts on the higher layers of the website optimization pyramid.
Good luck,
L
