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And

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203 577 8578

Expert Site Review - review outline and a snippet from one review
Our expert site review is the first step in building a great user experience. Here is a small piece of one review as an example. Typical work effort requires about 30 hours.
The review includes:

• a pre site interview,
• a thorough analysis of the site against our 104 guidelines,
• an detailed report with recommendations for how to improve your site,
• screen shots from your site of problems.
• and a 1-2 hour phone or in person consult to review the report.

Follow up design may be suggested but is not required.

Strategic Redesign Strategy. The report also forms the basis for how to approach site redesign. We can also offer wireframe site redesigns based upon best practice user experience testing which your web developers to follow. If you plan to do the IA (information architecture) in house, use our guidelines which are weighted based upon relative importance to help you build your strategic plan.

Each guideline is also rated with two additional rankings to form your strategic redesign plan.

• Impact of Fix on success ROI (3 from a range of 1-5)
• Estimated Effort to Comply (2 from a range of 1–5).

The Review covers 5 categories:

category	% of the total Score
Content Score	20.43%
Graphic Design Score	14.04%
Navigation Score	22.13%
Persuasive Score	19.15%
Technical Score	8.51%
Usability Score	15.74%
total	100.0%

A sample report for one guideline follows. Each guidelines discussion includes:

• Description of the guideline
• Benefits of compliance
• Example of the problem on the site, often with screen shot
• Recommendation s for how to correct and why
• Reference materials for further information

In this example we review a sites failure to comply with Guideline 51 from the Persuasion Category.


(51) Guideline: Sites must substantiate important product or company claims with data or links to source materials.

Benefits: Substantiation makes claims - and therefore your brand - significantly more credible, and credibility encourages site usage. Claims which are not substantiated are just more "marketese" and weaken your image. Credibility must be established for customer engagement.

Example: The claim, #1 in travel services is too important a claim not to substantiate. Hyperlinks are an easy way to substantiate claims like this and by demonstrating to clients that you back up your claims with facts, credibility is enhanced and therefore conversions increase.

Screenshot example of an unsubstantiated claim:

Recommendation : Your claim to be "#1 in Travel Insurance" needs support and should demonstrate why you are the best and why your prices may be lowest and who else thinks so. Use hyperlinks to internal pages to support claims but make sure that it is easy to navigate back to the original page. Provide an example that will convince me what you say is true. Alternatively you can use text to support the claim. If you link to outside references, open the link in a new window.

Example of fix: : #1 in Travel Insurance or
#1 in Travel Insurance Services as reported by J.D. Pow ers and Associates 2008

Reference: The Stanford Web credibility report demonstrates that 47% of visitors will make buy decisions based upon the professionalism of the site's appearance. The study also refers to the importance of substantiating product and company claims.

Typical grades for sites range in the 35% to 50%, by improving your site score, you can expect significant improvements on the ROI though we cannot make specific predictions or offer guarantees on results.

Download a PDF of a case study of one expert's results applying the tool.

 
"We're Ecstatic...In about six months the number of conversions has tripled, while the cost-per-conversion dropped by more than half!"

Gregg Dearth.
President Interim Step Marketing an innovative, pure ecommerce site.

"We looked to WMR's expertise to help us refine our web marketing strategies and evaluate the effectiveness of our website. Their Usability Study provided us significant insights and helped us understand where and how to improve our messaging and overcome navigational challenges. The investment yielded value well beyond our expectations; their knowledge and responsiveness made the process efficient and painless."

S Jourdan Director of Marketing
Tauck World Discovery

"Todd Follansbee's use
of innovative marketing
techniques and cutting
edge tools increased
our Web presence, which,
ultimately strengthened
our brand."

Author Carl Franklin,
host of .NET Rocks!
and president of
Franklins.net

We ascribe to the guidelines and
are members in good standing of the Usability Professionals Association

Index of WMR articles on tips for improving your web site

Read: Proven ways to increase conversions - lessons from multi variable testing

The Case for Courtesy

Conversion Point Architecture a new model for web design.

Building the Best Signup Page
July 2006

Ending Search to build Business!
April 2006

Colorblindness and usability. Todd's widely published review of colorblindness on Microsoft, IBM and Amazon from 1998.

Humor
see error messages we don't recommend!

Review and contribute to our Glossary of Web Marketing Terms