You know it as well as we do: a website is a kind of proxy for the organization behind it, and thus a site tends to reflect that organization – warts and all. Because sales and marketing don’t talk, the site’s product pages don’t work well. The US page is full of content; the Russian page….not so much. You get the point.

One of our clients, Magus, has dedicated its life to helping big organizations clean up on both sides of the curtain. That is, they provide probably the world’s best solution to manage and quality-control content on large sites, and they’re thought leaders on the subject of website governance (which they reflect on their blog).

They’ve seen what can go wrong and what needs to go right. So we sat down with them to illustrate (with not a little tongue in cheek) how things can go wrong in their experience, and what’s going to help keep things going right.

To show how things can go wrong, we worked with them on a visual story about a hypothetical website called www.webloop.com (yes, there ARE two meanings). It’s a humorous, but painfully accurate, account of the struggles of many large sites. Click on the image to get the full-sized version.

To describe what’s going to keep a website on the straight and narrow, we developed an eBook together with Magus that stakes out the golden rules for website governance. Here are the seven critical mistakes websites make, and how to avoid them. Click on the image to download the full eBook.

© Ryan Skinner for Velocity Partners, 2011. | Permalink | No comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: Clients, ebook, infographics, web governance, website design

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We’ve been working with the company and its CMO John Watton and CEO Paul Ostergaard since the end of 2007. For those of you that don’t know the company, it’s the leading maritime e-marketplace, helping the buyers and sellers of ship supplies to reduce the costs associated with doing business together and more than $1 billion-worth of trading goes through TradeNet, the company’s  electronic trading platform.

The success is testament to CEO Paul Ostergaard’s determination to stick with his e-marketplace vision when every other e-marketplace was falling by the wayside. And John’s innovative, creative approach to marketing is propelling ShipServ to new levels.

Congratulations to both of them and the rest of the team.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | One comment | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B design, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategy, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Technology Marketing, website build, website design

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If you do them thoroughly, personas mean you can develop better sites faster, ones that meet the needs of your customers, prospects and other stakeholders more effectively. They force everyone to think about what users might actually want to do when they visit your site and then shape the design accordingly.

So what are they? Personas are idealised, but specific, portraits of real users. We try to imagine a real person visiting the site – what sex are they, how old, what job do they have (we try to be as specific as possible, down to the precise company if possible), what type of information are they looking for and what do they want to do it with it once they’ve found it. Properly done, personas should replace guesswork with a clear understanding of what actually motivates people to visit your site and their needs when they get there. If you think about, it’s obvious that someone at the early stages of putting together an RFQ has very different requirements to someone who’s already put your firm on the shortlist and is looking to prepare a briefing document for his management team. Industry analysts and prospective employees have different requirements yet again.

For large consumer sites, it certainly makes sense to conduct research and intervews with consumers to identify the user groups you want to come and use your site. But in the B2B world, we’ve found that there’s really no need for this. A few hours in a room with some key stakeholders in the business – a senior marketing person, a sales guy, a partner manager and a senior techie are usually sufficient – as well as some telephone calls with people in the field, some actual partners or customers should get you pretty close.

That’s because there’s no call to overburden personas. It ‘s all about identifying the precise needs of your visitor groups and then using that to identify the site’s success factors, the navigation structure that best meets those needs, the content you require, the elements missing from your site and the features that are unnecessary.

We speed the process up by using a cool tool call Mind Manager from a company called Mindjet  – a mind mapping application – that let’s us quickly identify all our über-user types and then, on a single sheet of paper, permits us to summarise our mythical user’s background, his needs when he visits a vendor’s website and a typical scenario – really a detailed exposition of why he or she might be prompted to visit the site.

Here’s an example we prepared earlier.

Once we’ve got the personas done – there are usually no more than eight  – we can get really specific on the brief for the web designer.We find doing this can cut the early stages of design by half, because the designer has real people in her mind when she gets to work.

© stan@velocitypartners.co.uk for Velocity Partners, 2009. | Permalink | 5 comments | Add to del.icio.us
Post tags: B2B agency, B2B consulting, B2B design, B2B lead generation, B2B marketing, B2B marketing agency, B2B marketing communications, B2B marketing strategy, Content Marketing, digital marketing, Technology Marketing, website build, website design

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