When it comes to my fields of specialization, real estate website design and marketing, many of my clients seem to be in a hurry to market their website and get leads before making an honest evaluation of their site’s content strength and how it will resonate with their end users.
The idea that “the user should come first” when making decisions about site layout and content is so often stated that it can sound like an empty platitude. However, the message needs to ring true and really hit home. If you want your website to last, if you really want your website business to grow, then design your real estate website for people and do your best to make their user experience a happy one.
Of course, we have heard this mantra countless times and I can already see readers nodding more out of fatigue than approval. However, the sentiment really does need to be taken seriously. Why? The answer is because the future of the web is constantly evolving around the user experience. Attend to that experience and you will establish an edge that will keep your website on the forefront of your market.
What prompted me to write this article were some interviews I read on the Business Week website. Business Week did a short series of interviews with 5 of the major players at Google; Amit Singhal, Eric Schmidt, Udi Manber, Scott Huffman and Matt Cutts. Each of these individuals play pivotal roles in development and innovation with the company.
While each individual has a different role in the company, the primary purpose was the same for all. All were working to better understand the psychology of the web user and to create the best possible experience for them.
Amit Singhal’s efforts are directed at improving the user interface and constantly running experiments to test innovations. Eric Schmidt favors data openness “because we think that works best for the users.” Udi Manber has a special litmus test for his team when he says the “main measure is whether we help people and give them what they need.”
“We try to measure every possible which way we can think of how good is Google, how good are our search results, how well are they serving our users.” That is from the mouth of Scott Huffman.
And then there is Matt Cutts who defended Google’s methodology in his interview “because I feel like we wake up every day and work really, really hard to return the best-quality search results, and we’re fighting every day to do the best thing for our users.”
Now many webmasters are constantly spinning their wheels to rank for this and rank for that. They are watching the metrics, tracking the numbers, counting the leads they receive one by one. This is all well and good. Honestly, it is. But this pursuit should never lose sight of what is really important, the end user experience.
Yes, the statement “build websites for people, not search engines” does sound like an empty platitude these days. But in my opinion, it is a proverb that should not be taken lightly. If the seriousness with which Google takes the user experience is any indication, the future of the Internet is not simply in the next big app, marketing buzz trip, or other short-lived fad. Rather, the future is in the user and how they interact with the information and tools available to them.
Do you know your users as well as you should? Does your website give them what they need? Those two questions are a good starting point for delving into the psychology of your website visitors. Keep producing that website content for people, not search engines. And always keep in mind that the user comes first.
