Delivering Great Customer Experiences Online

Advanced web site design today is more than just creating an attractive web site. User based design techniques are used to identify the person you seek to attract to your website. This means creating a persona to drive every decision that affects the web site design. So, what factors should be included in a persona?
The persona we like to use is a one-page document that contains a picture of the customer, a summary of their demographics and some psychographic information to help the reader to understand who this person is. Let's say for example, that you were designing a website to sell running shoes. Many people wear running shoes such as ladies who use them to walk to work before switching to high heels, athletes, aging athletes who are looking for that edge, gardeners, laborers and gardeners. If your target audience were to be environmentally conscious and disagree with the exploitation of low cost labor in foreign countries, then your communication would be quite different to someone who was looking for the extra marginal performance needed to improve their long distance road race times.
With an understanding of your customer, a good web site designer can get to work on copyright. What would you say to our environmentally friendly customer when they visited the web site? Would you sell yourself on the low cost of the shoes due to the saving that you have been able to pass on by having them manufactured in a developing nation? No. This would not sell. Perhaps you might talk about the materials that the shoes are made of and the impact on the environment that will have when you finally discard them.
Really great web site design draws on these customer insights to create the type of experiences that a customer would prefer. If customers prefer visiting a website that has been well designed to meet their needs than it goes without saying that this will give the website an advantage over others that might be attempting to attract the same visitor. Good web site design can be a competitive advantage.

Pete Fick
Pete is a web site designer and search engine optimisation specialist.
Webwings Internet Marketing