Not Knowing Why

Many web sites are built simply because some executive told somebody to do it without telling them what the site should achieve. It is not an acceptable reason that "everybody else is doing it." Granted, these days, you need a web site simply to be considered a professionally run organization. Most organizations should start their web design project by finding out ways in which they can provide true customer value on their site. Give users benefits for spending time on your site, allow them to do business with you, and their money will follow.

Designing for Your Own VPs

Internally focused sites cause companies to end up with home pages full of mission statements, photos of the CEO, and corporate history (all of which do fit on an "about this company" page; just not on the home page). Remember that your organization is not the center of the universe for your customers. The site should be designed with the customers' needs in mind and not to promote grandiose ideas of self-importance. Do not build a site that your top executives will love; remind them that they are not the target audience.

Letting the Site Structure Mirror your Organizational Chart

Users should not have to care how your organization is structured, so they should not be able to deduce your organizational structure from the structure of your web site. Admittedly, it is easiest to distribute responsibility for the site to divisions and departments according to already established chains of command and budget categories, but doing so results in an internally centered site rather than a customer-focused site. The site structure should be determined by the tasks users want to perform on your site, even if that means having a single page for information from two very different departments.

Outsourcing to Multiple Agencies

If you outsource every new web project to a new agency, your site will end up looking like one of those quilts assembled from patches by each of the participants in a protest march. The problem with using multiple agencies is that each of them want to put their own stamp on the site: both because they have different design philosophies and because they will want to use you as a reference account. Users get very annoyed when they move between pages on a site and find drastically varying designs at every turn. Consistency is the key to usable interaction design. The best way to ensure consistency is to have a single department or central group that is responsible for the design of the entire site. Even if the central group does not actually design any pages themselves, considerable consistency can be achieved if the various departments can turn to a single source for design advice.

Forgetting to Budget for Maintenance

Obviously, ongoing costs are even higher for news sites and other projects on daily or real-time updates. If you simply spend the money to build a glamorous site but do not keep it up to date, your investment will very rapidly turn out to be wasted. The web currently changes so rapidly that a major redesign is needed at least once per year simply to avoid a completely outdated look and to accommodate change user expectations. Additional maintenance is needed throughout the year to bring fresh content online, reorganize and revise old pages, and avoid linkrot. As a rule of thumb, the annual maintenance budget for a website should be about the same as the initial cost of building the site, with 50 percent as an absolute minimum.

Treating the Web as a Secondary Medium

One rarely gets a gourmet meal by reusing yesterday's leftovers. Similarly, even if you reuse very valuable non-web content, you will at best get a slightly valuable web site. The web is a new medium. It's different from television. It's different from printed newspapers, and it's different from glossy brochures, so you cannot create a good web site out of content optimized for any of these older media. The old analogy still holds: movies are not made by filming a play and putting the camera in the best seat of the theater. The only way to get great web content is to develop the content for the web first. Then if you still have a need for printed collateral, transfer the text and images to a desktop publishing application and massage it into a form that is suited for print.

Wasting Linking Opportunities

The web is a linking medium: the hypertext links are what ties it together and allow users to discover new and useful sites. Most organizations have recognized this phenomenon to the extent that they religiously include their URLs in all advertising, TV commercials, press releases, and even in the products themselves (ever bought underwear with the URL woven into it?). Unfortunately, most of these URLs are overly generic and do not provide users with any payoff that is related to the context in which they user found the URL. Reverse this trend on your site. Do not link to your homepage in your ads. If you are running a campaign with a certain theme, have it include a URL to a page that follows up on that theme. The payoff page should not be a copy of the ad. Instead, use each medium for what it's good at.

Treating Internet and Intranet Sites the Same

Internal intranet web sites need to be managed very differently from public internet sites. The difference is that each company only has a single intranet and thus can manage it to a much greater degree of consistency and predictability than we can hope for on the wild web for many years. Also employees use the intranet for corporate productivity, meaning that any waste of users' time is a direct hit to the bottom line.

Confusing Market Research and Usability Engineering

A web design is an interactive product, and therefore usability engineering methods are necessary to study what happens during the user's interactions with the site. Users are not designers; they cannot tell you how to design your navigation. Listening carefully to customers will often reveal frustrations that can turn into opportunities for improvement, but once you have an idea for an improvement, you must create a prototype design and try it out with users in a usability test to see whether it really works for them. The point is that market research forms the starting point but has to be supplemented with usability engineering if you want a design that works when people try to use it.

Underestimating the Strategic Impact of the Web

It is a huge mistake to treat the web as if it were an online brochure and manage it out of the marketing-communications department. The web should be considered one of the most important determinants of the way you will do business in the future. The web enables completely new ways of doing business such as true globalization. The two classic errors in predicting the future of a technology shift are to over-estimate its short-term impact and under-estimate its long-term impact. The web has been hyped to such an extent that people overestimate what it can do the next year or two; most websites are not going to turn a profit any time soon. But please don't underestimate what will happen once we reach the goal of everyone, everywhere; connected. The impact of networks grows by at least the square of the number of connections, and the true value of the web will only be seen after extensive business process reengineering.

* Extrapolated from Jakob Nielsen's "Top Ten Mistakes of the Web"

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