This article recently appeared in Brent Winters MarketPosition Newsletter:
Study: 40% Change Brands After Researching Online
A recent study by The Dieringer Research Group reported that 40 percent of Internet users in the US changed their opinions of brands due to information they gathered online. That means it's more important than ever to expand the presence of your business on the Web if you wish to influence discerning buyers. It's also just as important to build an effective Web site that educates and sells consumers on the products and services you offer.

eMarketer estimated that there were 152.8 million Internet users in the US in 2002. Multiplying 40 percent by 152.8 tells us that 61 million people in the US alone changed their minds regarding the products they wanted to purchase after conducting online research. That speaks volumes about the importance of every business having a great Web site that can be easily found by consumers doing product research.

So what is by far the most common way to research products and services online? Search engines of course! One could cite countless studies to confirm this fact, but your own hands on experience is probably just as reliable. Simply ask yourself: What do you do when you're interested in learning more about a product or service? Sometimes you'll go directly to a vendor's Web site if you know the URL, but more often you'll load your favorite search engine and do a quick keyword search to find reviews, pricing, competitors, and so forth.

This little article is describing radical changes in thinking about brand marketing. Advertising and marketing has always aimed at young adults, based on the belief that consumers tend to stick with the brand they came in with. The Internet, with readily available research and browsing has changed all that, making the accessibility and depth of your website more important than ever. If a well-designed and effective website can play such an important role in brand awareness, the time is near when those in charge of advertising dollars will have to re-think where they'll get the best return on investment.

Another emerging tenet of good web design is that often, less is more. Early web sites tended to add bells and whistles as the technology became available, often at the expense of usability. Also, many first generation web sites, in an attempt to keep up with technology, have added functions and coding as they became available, turning their website into a hodge-podge of unintegrated functionality. In the interest of economy,companies often have their sites designed by Uncle Bob or Uncle Bob's cousin's sister. In the long run, sites like this do more harm than good. An effective web presence needs to fulfill the basic rules of web use as well as the needs of users. The following article from Infoconomy addresses today's thinking on good design:

Simplicity is priceless
Designing web sites that are simpler and easier to use may produce more benefits than adding more powerful technologies. So how can companies put in place the processes to give web users what they really want?

By Rob Buckley

Lots of web sites are "miserable". They do not justify the time and money that has been invested in them. That is the opinion of web usability guru Jakob Nielsen. As co-founder of consultancy the Nielsen Norman Group, Nielsen has tested hundreds of web sites to see if they achieve their aims. He believes that many projects have either set out with the wrong objectives in mind or their designers have ignored small, but important details during their development. "I've done testing where users have been on a site for half-an-hour and still don't know what's going on. In the real world, they would have left long ago."

The Nielsen Norman Group's advice on site design ranges from simple placement issues (such as put a search box in the top left-hand or right-hand corner of the page) and technology issues (don't use Flash applications, particularly for pointless introductions), to content issues (make sure there are prices next to all the products in an e-catalogue, instead of making customers drill down to find them). But for Nielsen, and others, while usability is a design issue, it is also a business issue.

With the mad rush of the dot-com boom over, there is no place for haphazard or slapdash approaches to web design, says Nielsen. The emphasis should be on careful planning and ease of navigation and on making sure the mistakes of the past are not repeated. So how should companies make sure that their sites perform acceptably, without costing too much money?

Nielsen argues that the average web user comes to a site to access information or to perform a task, both of which they want to do as quickly and easily as possible Simplifying pages and graphics, and making sites easier to navigate and use are options that will produce far greater benefits for most companies, maintains Nielsen. The costs of improving a site's usability by changing its content and interface will be more than paid for by the gains, he adds.

Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group: There is no place for slapdash web site design

Constant feedback and testing, Jakob Nielsen says, is very important. Iterative testing, where designs are continually evaluated by user focus groups and then modified before being given back to the groups, will ensure that, as new content is added to the site, or as new groups of users come to it, the site adapts to continue to provide maximum functionality and usability. But the site design needs to be based on a scalable concept from the beginning.

The worst thing developers can do says Marie Tahir, director of strategy at the Nielsen Norman Group, "is add navigation to sites but not have a scalable design in the first place. You don't want to have so many navigation schemes you're not sure what the main navigation system is." Confuse the user and he or she will leave or use the system.

Things NOT to put on a web site

The Nielsen Norman Group has tested hundreds of sites on users around the world. Their testing suggests companies should not do the following:

* Put pictures of 'smiling ladies' on their site
According to director of strategy, Marie Tahir, 'smiling ladies' is the nickname the group has given to generic pictures of seemingly elated women often holding babies that are on the front pages of numerous companies' web sites, from toy stores to oil companies. "They don't relate to anything and draw attention away from the content," says the group.

* Have a meaningless motto
The tag line on a web site should succinctly explain the purpose of the site. Users will not drill down through a site to find out what it does.

* Try to be too different
Common functions such as 'search', 'Contact us', and 'About us' should be called by those names so as not to frustrate and confuse users.

* Use pull-down menus if normal links can be used instead
Pull-down menus are difficult to manipulate and do not show all the options at once.