Respond and post more examples of your favorite custom 404 error pages to Keos Marketing Group blog.

The short story: Mazda is more "doom doom" than "zoom zoom", Toyota leads the pack and Honda hobbles along in the middle (though still far ahead of Mazda's online offering).

The longer story: I made my subjective opinion based on -
1. How easily I could locate my closest dealer.
2. How easily I could get information about the vehicles I am interested in.
3. General very subjective opinion about the website.

1. Being able to locate a dealer online
Landing on the Toyota website, there is a clear and easy to use Dealer Quick Find which is a search box right on the page. And the results page: it's got links to maps and directions to the dealer. Being directionally challenged, these are things I like!

Moving on to Mazda and Honda, the links to their dealer locations are not as prominent, and there are no maps! And, on the Mazda site, they even managed to get a typo into the address. Tut tut.

2. How easily can I get information about the cars I am interested in
It is easiest to find and compare on the Toyota website, and both Honda and Toyota let you download the brochures for their cars as a pdf. Mazda has an e-brochure which only works on Windows. So, I can't even view their brochure on my (now happily working) Mac. Grrrrr.

3. General very subjective opinion
All three sites use Flash on their homepages, but the Mazda site seemed to take forever to load. Mazda has a lot of little tools which I am sure seemed like a good idea to the planning team, but on the whole are poorly executed. The website seems not to take any consideration of the user, which makes me wonder if the car is going to feel the same way. Toyota continues on its track record of reliable with a website that caters better my needs. Toyota links easily to a search for previously loved cars, and also has a link to its Facebook page. And Honda, I haven't looked too closely!

I probably won't make a purchase decision based on a website, but if I did, I'd be sticking to Toyota. Mazda didn't even let me access the basic information I would need. In fact, the Mazda website looks like it was designed by an ad agency: pretty (if you like that sort of thing) but lacking in functionality.

Scott, BMW is a little out of my price range right now, but give me a couple of years and I'll be test driving your website too!

*Toyota Tazz - no zippy coupe for me (yet)

Some things we can tell you now about the new blog...

• The new blog will be our first step in becoming Arkansas' premier firm for web usability, e-commerce, search marketing and web analytics.
• Spectrics' new blog will also be our corporate website
• You should be blogging for your business too.
• We have transfered our blog platform from Typepad to Wordpress (more on this decision later).

We appreciate your patience.

If you need something from us in the meantime, please don't hesitate to contact us.

Although you probably never thought of your website in this way before, you probably should consider it now. Shoppers, whether they walk into a department store, a supermarket, or surf into a website, usually don't want to have to hunt for what they came in for: The advertised products or services. If you make your visitors dig through page after page trying to find your shipping info or return policy or the product or service they specifically entered your site for, chances are they'll leave and never come back.

You don't have to settle for a vanilla or chocolate flavored cookie-cutter website but you should insist that it be structured in such a way that visitors to your site can see what you offer in about 3 seconds: That's the average time it takes for a visitor to make a decision to stay or go. Make sure your site is easily navigable, not overwhelmingly busy, and simple to check out of with your shipping info, contact information and return policy obvious. If you have a contact form for gathering leads, let the visitor know exactly what you intend to do with their information on the contact page itself and how soon you intend to get back in touch. Don't make your visitors have to leave the page they're on to find information pertinent to the sale or submitting contact information.

Convenience, great service, and an uncomplicated shopping experience will put your shoppers at ease and set your site apart from others offering the same or nearly the same product or service at the same price. You'll have visitors who stay longer, buy from you and return for more purchases in the future. Better yet, they may tell their friends and co-workers about your site and everyone knows that word-of-mouth advertising is the best advertisement.

Julie Ayres

A well-designed site is one that sells! It leads visitors through the sales process without getting in their way. If it's pretty on top of that, fine.

What you want your design to do is entice people to stay on your site when they get there, draw them into your message and make it easy for them to keep reading so they can make a buying decision. However, many sites do just the opposite. Below are the Seven Deadly Sins which could be killing your conversion rates:

Website design sin #1: Slow-loading pages and graphics
Count out three seconds. In web time, it feels like forever! If your home page takes that long to load, you've got trouble on your hands. Web users are extremely impatient people. If they can't begin reading or viewing your page right away, they're going to leave and go to another, more user-friendly site.

If you absolutely must use large graphics on your homepage, provide a small icon that links to the larger graphic and warn people they may have to wait as it loads. Here are a few things you can do to speed up your loading time:

Reduce the file size of the graphics on your page. Specify the dimensions of your graphics files in your HTML code. Substitute coloured text for a graphics file whenever possible.

Website design sin #2: No eye-catching headline to grab your visitors' attention
Now you have to capture your visitors' attention right away and convince them your site has exactly what they're looking for. The best way to do that is with a well-formatted, attention-grabbing headline that's packed with intriguing benefits and compels them to read further.

Website design sin #3: Distracting banners and links
On your site, don't put up banners or links that send people to someone else's site (and that includes Google AdWords ads). Everything on your site should directly relate to its ultimate purpose - whether it's to get more opt-ins for your e-mail list or to sell your product. Anything on your site that doesn't serve this main purpose should be immediately deleted.

Of course, if the purpose of your site is purely to promote affiliate products or sell advertising space, then obviously you'll want to include banners or links. But if you try to promote affiliate products on a page that's also meant to sell a specific product, you'll end up doing a lousy job of both.

Website design sin #4: Too many dizzying colours or fonts
Nothing screams "amateur!" louder than a dizzying mishmash of different fonts and colours. To make your site look professional, use a basic colour scheme with two or three colours and a couple of fonts. Look at any well-designed site and you'll see that it's pretty conservative with the colours and fonts it uses.

Website design sin #5: Patterned backgrounds
Make sure your background stays in the background! If you add textures or use dark backgrounds on your site, people won't be able to read your copy easily. And if you aren't making it easy for them to read your copy, you aren't making it easy for them to buy your product.

Tests have shown over and over again that the sites with black text on a plain white background - with colours limited to the margins - get the highest conversion rates. It might seem boring from a design perspective, but better sales are pretty exciting from an income perspective.

Website design sin #6: Too many distracting graphics, animations, or video clips
Here's another amateur mistake: thinking that lots of images, fancy graphics, animated gifs or video clips will make your site more interesting. Unless those visual elements help persuade people to buy your product by showing visitors what your product looks like, or demonstrating how it works, they're useless decorations that will distract your visitors and prevent them from following through on what you want them to do.

Website design sin #7: Huge blocks of text that are nearly impossible to read
What happens when you run into a giant block of text on a website? Do you read it, scan it or skip over it to something shorter?

If you want your visitors to read all the way to your "order" button, make it as easy as possible for them to do so. Limit your paragraphs to six lines. And make sure you vary your paragraph lengths so they don't all look the same. A choppy paragraph structure makes online text much easier to read.

So this morning my bride finally convinces to me just go buy a new battery for the car.  Obviously, I'm not going to get on the Internet to buy a battery.  I wouldn't know exactly what to do once it got to my house.  But I did want to go to the Internet to get some information on car batteries.   

I was prepared to go to AutoZone.  Why AutoZone, you ask?  Honestly, because they advertise a lot.  I trust their brand.  So I Googled something about 'car battery', because I didn't want to come across as an idiot when I took my car to the store.  But something happened along the way...

I clicked on paid ad for Advance Auto Parts, an AutoZone competitor, about 'car batteries'.  Eureka!  It took me to the landing page you can see below:

Did I go to the right place or what?  I'm in Internet Car Battery Heaven!

For a second, just think about this landing page.  There are several pictures of car batteries, so they are immediately meeting my needs.  Next, the words 'Fast' and 'Free' jumped out me.  So did I order my battery?  Of course not!

I clicked on the easy to find 'Store Locator' button and found a store right here in Little Rock, Arkansas.  They actually have several stores I could have gone to.  But if I hadn't gone to their website Store Locator I would not have known that I drive by one several times per week. 

In less than an hour, I had called the store and asked how much I should expect to pay for a new battery, had my new battery installed and went to work.  Now my car starts every time!      

So what is the lesson here?  Some businesses still want to quibble about the value of their website.  If it weren't for Advance Auto Parts well done Internet Marketing Car Battery Strategy I would have bought a battery from one of their competitors today.  Instead, I'm going to buy every car battery for the rest of my time in Arkansas from the store I was at this morning. 

Can they trace the purchase to their website?  Probably not, but it is technically possible.  But Internet Marketing is clearly starting to drive offline sales.  Thus ends the case study.

This is a bit of a sensitive isssue to tackle because so many businesses want Flash and have paid a lot of money for it.  However, the customer is not always right (sorry Customer). 

A) Search engines can't read Flash.  They can, however, read pictures with alt-tags.  So if you are worried about search rankings, Flash is hurting - not helping.

B) Flash is significantly more expensive development work.  (Here's a hint...) That's why web design firms love talking businesses into using Flash.  Maybe it looks great on your website, but it looks even better in their bank account.

C) Aside from the additional costs and possibly harming your traffic levels, Flash rarely supports a business purpose.  And here at Spectrics, we believe that web design should support real business goals.

So do I just loathe Flash?  Not entirely.  There are times that it doesn't violate the previously made points.  Here are a few tips...

• NEVER have a Flash intro page to your website.  Never.
• Flash is actually fantastic for demonstrating how a product works.  Flash literally brings objects to life online in a way static pictures can't.
• As a rule, use Flash on internal pages rather than home pages (and certainly never Intro pages).  A good SEO team should also be working on internal pages, but Flash does less damage to search rankings on internal pages. 

One of my favorite examples of this are Flash intros (more on this another time).  But the primary thing Flash intros do is help Flash developers drive nicer cars.  In fact, Flash intros can really hurt websites.

Business websites should serve concrete business goals - like profitability, perhaps?

Websites meet business goals through focusing on usability and conversion rates - not fancy design.

I noticed the site index at the bottom. Here is a screenshot:

Glorious visibility! I can see everything that's going on

Regardless of its positioning or size, there is something that really appeals to me about this site index.

With one simple glance, I get a great idea of the structure of the site and the pages contained within the various sections.

The index, through use of color and font variations, clearly displays my location within the Brunswick website at any given time.

Great job.

You better believe it, I'm a Fortune 500 website!

Warren Buffet's Berkshire Hathaway, Inc, website has an extremely interesting design.

As you can see, it is a very simple hyperlink-based website – very 1995.

I am in two minds about this website. The website is very simple to use, very easy to navigate and the user can determine the content of the entire site at one glance.

On the other hand, the website looks cheap. It doesn't look like the site of one of the biggest companies in the world. It actually had me guessing for a short period of time, wondering whether it was for real.

Doubting the integrity of a website could force a user into going elsewhere. Maybe this doesn't matter for Warren, but it would matter for other companies.

Oh, by the way, original links are in purple, not blue – it looks like I've visited all of those links before, but in actuality I've only visited the first one (in red.) The descriptions are written in a very small font and the Geico advertisement at the bottom is another thing I wouldn't expect on a Fortune 500 website (although Geico is a subsidiary of Berkshire Hathaway.)

Love it or hate it, I do believe that many people will think this is most odd.

My synth – wonderful sounds, awful interface

Despite my synthesizer's audio capabilities, I never really programmed many of my own sounds because of the interface - it was all digital. To make things "simpler," manufacturers cut back on the knobs, sliders and switches that adorned the old school instruments. Instead, they replaced the analog interfaces with buttons and small LCD screens. Features that were essential to sculpting audio were hidden behind menus, sub menus and sub-sub menus. Elements of a sound's dynamic could only be changed one at a time – and that's only if you could remember under which sequence of buttons the function resided. Think of it like this: you had hundreds of ways to alter and program a sound – but only fifteen buttons to do it with.

Modern synth – old school interface, 100% usable

There was an obvious usability issue here. So, in the mid-nineties, manufacturers started to build cutting-edge digital synthesizers with analog shells in an effort to make programming an audio landscape more hands-on. "Controller" keyboards started to spring up - keyboards that couldn't produce sounds by themselves, but would act as an interface for another keyboard thus allowing the essential sound parameters to be tweaked using the knobs and sliders of the controller keyboard, not the menus and sub-menus of the slave digital synthesizer.

Controllers are even more important now. The advancement of the microchip and computer technology now means that traditional synthesizer hardware (i.e. the whole unit) can be boiled down to a piece of software that you can load on your computer. The computer screen does act as a decent interface as you can visually see many parameters at once – but it's still hard to control. By hooking up a relatively cheap controller keyboard to your computer, it creates the illusion that you are playing a fully fledged analog interfaced synthesizer.

Thinking about websites, designers need to always be aware that no matter how complex or simple there website is, the only controller that their users will use is a mouse and, most frequently, the left mouse button. Sometimes users will have to use the keyboard, but the primary navigation is just a little piece of plastic that fits in the palm of the hand.

Musicians learn to use their equipment inside out – they study user manuals, musician forums and, spend hours and hours experimenting. Website users are the exact opposite. They must be able to use almost every single website out there with no prior education or instruction.

The usability of a website can be defined as the ease with which visitors are able to achieve specified goals. The usability of business/commercial websites is becoming a key differentiator for website owners in an increasingly competitive market.

The first port of call for those interested in learning more about this subject is the Jakob Nielsen website on Usability and Web Design. The website Usability.gov also lays down a very useful step-by-step usability guide:

• Plan - Develop, Processes, Project Team
• Analyse - Users, Task Analysis, Developing Personas
• Design - Website Requirements, Writing for The Web, Parallel Design
• Test & Refine - Usability Testing, Analysing Results, Test Reports

Whilst search engine marketing and promotion is important in order to drive visitors to your company website - it is what you do with those visitors which will ultimately determine your online success.

Once a potential customer arrives onto your website, they have to be able to actually navigate around/through the site and understand the content. Otherwise, your site is rapidly going to lose potetnital buyers, who will simply click-off and probably take their custom to your nearest competitor!

really uber "I have a Ph.D in cognitive psychology, human behavioral sciences and human-computer interaction" scientific companies

OR

companies that offer unrelated usability services, but work really hard and have cool software!

Website usability, defined by MarketingTerms.com, is "the ease with which visitors are able to use a Web site." Basically, it's the science and psychology of how to best design a website so every individual can successfully navigate and utilize the site for his or her needs. With this in mind, I definitely want a usability company with a strong background in the sciences and directors or principals with a Ph.D or Masters. That being said, I would also consider, a much more modestly priced usability company, with a long company list and proven track record.

What I wouldn't want is an overpriced usability company that focuses primarily on research and training and charges $25,000 for a ONE DAY "visioneering" intensive workshop. IF I or any company would pay that much for a one day workshop - you better supply some serious ROI facts, before any $ is dropped on a workshop with a made-up name.

PC Magazine's List for Top Usability Firms
Human Factors International
Austin Usability/Perceptive Sciences
Creative Good
Cooper Interaction Design
Nielsen Norman Group
User Interface Engineering

 I've just finished reading Steve Krug's book, Don't Make Me Think.

Although the book is an introduction to usability, I'd recommend that anyone in the field of usability testing read it. It's a great sanity check.

Steve has a wonderful style of writing that I find particularly suitable for this subject. He gives you the information that you need to know, often framed in humorous examples, and uses colorful graphics and illustrations break up the to-the-point text…very usable!

There is no doubt that for the client to get any value out of the process, they need to know what all of the data means. As usability specialists, we all need to apply our expertise to the data that we gather.

The worst thing we can do is give the client the data (a transcript, DVD, etc) and leave it at that. I mean you wouldn't give a complicated product to a customer and not tell them how to use it, would you?

Some usability firms don't like to write reports at all (Steve Krug hates "big honking reports"), they prefer to present to the client directly. Some firms like to write huge reports (Nielsen Norman Group' Intranet Information Architecture report – 1193 pages!) My firm likes to write concise and graphical reports and present the findings to the client.

The point is that we all (in our own way) interface with the client. It is our job to not only conduct the testing, but to tell the client what the results of the testing means to them. We need to translate the findings into something our clients can use, because that is where the value of hiring a third party to do it lies.

What's the point of a usability study if the results aren't usable for the client?

Of the 150 online retailing respondents, here are some highlights:

• 88% are prioritizing improving product detail pages. 
• 76% are using A/B testing for offers and promotions.
• 91% are using emailing marketing
• 88% are using pay per click advertising
• 67% are using affiliate marketing
• 56% are using comparison shopping engines
• 51% are using search engine optimization

So what...?

As the online retailing world continues to mature I really believe the SMB market is getting left behind.  Not too long ago, the Internet was a place that SMB and niche retailers could move into and make a significant difference to their business.

But now, they have dragged their feet long enough to where they are falling further behind the trends. 

But if you are one of the few that still wants to make a difference to your business before it is too late, what should you do?

A) Probably redesign your website with someone who is concerned with meeting your business goals, not just designing another website

B) Develop a realistic plan for where the traffic is going to come from - search engines, affiliate marketing, email marketing, etc... BTW - I am stunned that only 51% of the surveyed retailers are using SEO.  There is still an opportunity there. 

C) Invest in a solid analytics program and analysts.  You can use Google Analytics as training wheels, but once you are ready you should swith to Omniture's SiteCatalyst program (or one of it's competitors like Coremetrics or Visual Sciences)

It really is an improvement from the last one and it is really a resource for everyone in the Internet Marketing field as well our potential clients.