A couple of weeks ago I was fortunate to be able to take some time out from the business and spend the day at Building The Perfect Council Website. It was the first time I had attended and I wasn't sure what to expect. I had already done my research and knew that Ektron, Jadu and Sitecore were among the exhibitors and thought it would give me a good opportunity to talk to them about what their products offered and to see how they stood up against Documentum Web Publisher and SilverStripe.

It also gave me the opportunity to talk with people within the councils about what was important to them and what the major challenges are. Unsurprisingly top of most agendas is usability and accessibility. Only once during the day did I hear someone mention Google during a discussion group, headed up by Marco Ranon from RNIB, which was looking at accessibility of PDF documents. Also on the agenda was location based services and the benefits of providing content relevant to the visitor's location, 3D websites and Social Networking.

One of the highlights for me was Gerry McGovern's plenary, The Story of a Web Site. His opening, "Your website is not a murder mystery" was about making it easy for users to find the information they are looking for quickly and effortlessly. According to Gerry's research the top three negative user experiences are poor search results, confusing menus and links and out of date content.

Poor search results

Your view on poor search results depends on whether you're looking to be found in the search engines, or for your users to find information quickly within your website. All webmasters will at some point need to address one or the other, or both. There are several things you can do to improve your search engines ranking (read my blog on Ten tips for making page one). All search engines are looking to provide relevant content in their results. That's why they are regularly tweaking their algorithms. Our search consultants are continually researching the latest search trends and keywords so that we can advise our clients accordingly and so that in turn they can make appropriate changes to their websites in order that their content surfaces in all the right places. It's not about getting on any page one. It's fundamentally important for you to be on the right page one.

Similarly when someone does get to your website you want to make it as easy as possible for them to find the information they are looking for quickly. If you're website has a search capability take time to analyse the searches and the content displayed and make sure that your visitors can find what they're looking for. Do the same with external searches that arrive at your website. Are your visitors arriving at the right place? Bounce rate and click paths are good indicators. A high bounce rate suggests that they came to your website looking for one thing, found something else and left. Your click paths will give you an indication of the user experience and what visitors did next. There are several good analytics applications available which will provide you with detailed website analytics. The most common is Google Analytics which is free.

Confusing menus and links

One of the key things we correct on our clients websites are their navigation and links. Positive user experience is about taking people on a successful journey. When they click on a link for "Website design" they expect to arrive at a page on "Website design". If they arrive somewhere else or the message isn't clear when they arrive they're likely to have a negative experience and then view your website negatively in future. Research shows that when people have a negative experience they're more likely to view that website as unhelpful when they see it again and move on to the next site. There are also some benefits of clear navigation linking to relevant content from a search engine perspective. Search engines index the keywords in the link and their relevance to the content on the page. Get the linking right and it can lift your position in the search engine rankings.

Out of date content

Old, out of date content can make you're website look tired, irrelevant and worthless. You should update your website periodically to make sure that the information it contains is fresh and of interest to your clients. A good content management system, like SilverStripe or Documentum Web Publisher, will help you to do this easily and quickly. It's a good idea to periodically refresh your website's design and improve it's usability for your clients. We'd even recommend giving it a complete overhaul every couple of years to make sure that it's keeping up to date with the current coding standards.