All great websites have at least one thing in common: they provide the user with a great experience. Whether aiming to get visitors to spend money, fill out a form, or simply consume content, crafting an intuitive and enjoyable experience that guides users to the intended goal is crucial to the success of a site. Now that’s not to say we should design sites that force users in a single direction; in fact I would suggest quite the contrary. By providing just the right number of options and carefully constructing the paths down which each option leads, we are able to allow users to self-identify with content important to them and naturally find their own path to their intended goal. As I will show here, implementing this approach to content organization can lead to higher conversion rates, more satisfied site users, and improved site performance.

As creators of websites, our goal is to give the user options, but only such that they are immediately relevant and a) lead the user to the end goal, and/or b) pushes the user to make a decision that will further qualify them and move them down a path catered to their unique interests or demographic. If we make a user make a decision (often thought of as simply a ‘click’ in the web world), we want to make the most of the information they’re providing with that decision. With each step a user takes down the path, they are letting us know what they want. Thus, we create click paths that, with each decision or ‘click’ the user is further narrowing their interests, allowing us to provide more and more information specifically relevant to their aim.

This model of User Experience, or UX design transcends the traditional waterfall structure of a website in terms of how users navigate the site, but not necessarily in terms of how the site is actually structured. A site designed with these concepts in mind may be laid out with a traditional waterfall hierarchy based on the main navigation structure, but the UX is designed more laterally. This approach to organizing information and content eliminates the burden of linear, top-down browsing experiences and allows users to access relevant information directly and easily from any area of the site.

Let’s look at some examples. Sites like DRIFIRE.com use specifically-placed subpage callouts and industry-specific landing pages to help guide users down paths based on their interests and needs. The Silverscape site utilizes blog excerpts and sidebar content on subpages as part of an inter-site linking strategy to keep users engaged and naturally exploring the site and related content to what they were first seeking. Corporate sites like Veracode.com, which don’t sell online but look to drive visitors to take the next step in the sales process, utilize relevant content and calls to action throughout the site to help increase the ‘stickiness’ (length of time visitors stick around) of the site and encourage visitors to take the next step towards becoming a customer.

For all you CEOs and CMOs out there concerned about the overall business implications of improving the user experience of your site – don’t worry! Crafting an effective UX doesn’t necessarily mean redesigning your entire site. By repurposing existing content areas and implementing a powerful Content Management System like Common Goal WebManager, you can gain the control you need to create a site that helps guide users through a positive experience, ultimately leading to increased conversions and improved site performance overall. Google knows a good UX when it crawls a site with one. Implementing this type of UX plan requires a lot of inter-site linking and grouping, or at least linking, of relative content, which can have a dramatic affect on the PageRank of each page on the site. The higher the PageRank of a page, the more valuable the page appears to Google; and the more valuable the page in Google’s eyes, the higher the page will rank in Google’s search listings for relevant searches.

Stay tuned for my upcoming posts on how to view your site from your audiences point of view, PageRank and the significance of following best practices for content production and organization!