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E-consultancy blog

Government websites get the chop

Government websites get the chop

One casualty of the UK government’s austerity drive will be a number of websites (600 of them!) which in many cases perform a useful service. Sadly, like most public sector projects, the cost of running them is eye-watering. According to Business Link website costs £2.15 per visit on the E-consultancy blog, the UK Trade and Investment site cost a total of £4.7m to build and run, and has been visited by just 399,501 people (yes, that’s over £10 a visit). To me, that many visitors isn’t a bad result, but… Read More »Government websites get the chop

Avoiding errors in error pages

I’ve mentioned “error pages” before, but I’ll revisit the subject regularly until everyone’s sorted theirs out. Do you know what happens if someone types in a page on your site which doesn’t exist? Here’s what happens on our site. Is your “error page” as user-friendly? Try typing a load of nonsense after your domain name and see what happens. Even if you think what you’re providing is OK, it may still be worth reading 404 error pages, news sites and user experience on the E-consultancy blog, where they investigate what… Read More »Avoiding errors in error pages

Get more Good Stuff on your site

An excellent article has just appeared on the E-consultancy blog about content for your B2B website. In Creating Cracking Corporate Content author Kevin Gibbons reminds us that the days of writing stilted web pages full of key search terms have long gone, and nowadays there’s little difference between copy which “works” for human visitors and that which “works” for search engines. The content requirements for technology guides, press releases, product descriptions and blogs are all discussed. Well worth digesting.

Don’t assume we’re all alike

Most of you won’t be redesigning your company website any time soon, and even then, if you’re part of a large corporation, you may get little or no input to the exercise. But it’s worth understanding the fundamentals of on-screen design, and an easy-to-understand article called What is the best screen resolution to use for your website? on the E-consultancy blog is a well-written guide if you want to understand one of the most basic decisions behind how a website looks. I’m writing this on an iMac with a huge… Read More »Don’t assume we’re all alike

Focus on what you want the visitor to do

Increasingly, experts are suggesting that you focus on getting your website visitors to do the one thing you want them to do, rather than impress them with the breadth of options you offer. Having built up a successful online publishing venture myself on precisely this principle, I find that most gratifying. Analysts amongst you will be interested in a recent study which compared the ability to “find a camera which you like” on the Argos, Comet, eBuyer and Currys websites, discussed in Argos beats competition with user-friendly web design on… Read More »Focus on what you want the visitor to do