US Entrepeneurs Using Web Technology to Accelerate Success

The BizTechDay was held on October 22 and 23 at the Hyatt Regency San Francisco Airport.  The theme of this event was how to utilize the present web technology for the business success.  The seminars were held to introduce various tactics to boost the sales of small to medium sized businesses. There were several known faces such as Justin Kan of Justin TV and btrax CEO, Brandon Hill participated as a genius of Asian markets and presented the current web trends in Asia.

Btrax  held a booth next to Google, WordPress, and Elance, and we provided free website analysis. To our surprise, we received many inquiries. And all of them had some factors to improve. People are drawn more towards “look and feel” than to “functionality”. And it seems like they are satisfied by having sites up even if their websites are not fully functioning, as a tool of internet marketing.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO) has been a buzz word for a while, but that is not the whole story. Since new web marketing methods are created such as using social networking services (SNS), search engines are not the only things to be considered. It is true that people are more likely to click the link to your company if your company name appears on the top of the search results. This will surely increase the hit numbers of your site. But if the site does have any information a user wants, he is likely to navigate away. Thus the bounce back rate increases. In order to make people to take action such as contacting, buying, or sending an inquiry, people need to search through your website. The key is to keep them for longer.

How do we achieve that goal? It is crucial to improve usability of your website. How well people can locate and discover needed information depends on usability. The book When Search Meets Web Usability by Shari Thurow and Nick Musica says good usability makes a website effective, efficient, easy to learn, memorable, error preventive, and satisfactory for a user.  If you have more graphical and textual sense of information on every page, people follow the lead. I highly recommend this book for its strategies and advice for people looking to increase the usability on their sites.

People will stay longer searching your website and once they find what they were looking for, they will move on to next action. How long do visitors stay on your site? Isn’t it time to review the usability of your website?

Photos by Tim Wagner