A website is your most powerful tool for communication and information. No business is too small for a website and as such, businesses with a website try to put out every information any user, customer, or prospective customer might need about the business. Yet, most of the time you find people asking questions that have already been answered on the website.
Imagine going to a website, scrolling past all the information only to get to the contact or inquiry form, fill it up, and send to the owner with the same questions that the website has already answered. Who exactly is to blame for this?
Is it the developer who has done a bad job? Is it the user who is lazy to read? Is it the owner who hasn’t put out enough information? Or it is the user who is not internet savvy enough to get the info they need? As a developer, I think the latter is the case.
When developers are making a website, the first thing, one of the first things they do is to plan the layout of the user interface. This is so important to developers. We place so much emphasis on the user interface because that is who the website is being made for. We try to make everything look very easy, (Except for a few bad developers who don’t really care about user interface) because, a bad interface increases Bounce Rate.
Bounce rate is an Internet marketing term used in web traffic analysis. It represents the percentage (%) of visitors who enter the site and then leave (“bounce“) rather than continuing to view other pages within the same site.
Bad interface contributes to more than 50% of bounce rate and to avoid this, developers try their best to make the interface as friendly as possible. That is why a website has navigation, headers, photos and many more.
Navigate Properly.
When you get to a website, before looking for the contact form to ask already answered questions, try to locate the navigation menu. The navigation menu is key to information you need on every website. There are some websites that even include FAQ because they know people will ask these questions. These are the things you should look for on a website.
The website is there because it is a communication or information hub for whatever business or person that owns it. Asking questions that efforts have already been put towards looks annoying and when no response is rendered, customers or users begin to issue bad reviews when in fact, it’s really their fault.
A website isn’t easy to make, nor is it cheap. It is certainly not easy to maintain as well. If you happen to be on a website that has been designed well and kept up to date then it means the owners are putting in a lot of money and efforts to keep you informed about whatever they do. On your part, try to seek the information you want, which most probably is already on the website before asking questions, thereby increasing their work load. Not every business is buoyant enough to employ customer reps who just sit there to answer repetitive questions.
If you own a smartphone, you should also be smart enough to know how to use it and give it up (smiles..)
This article is by Nastin Mfena (2020) developer and founder of Learnopedia Solutions Inc. Learnopedia provides an e-learning marketplace and web solutions to businesses across the globe. You can get a web quote here: https://petruthit.com/get-a-quote/
