What is a M.A.U.V.E. website?
GodfreyHart believes all websites should be:-
Manageable
Website changes
Your website design should enable updates within reasonable time periods. You may be using a Content Management System (CMS) or relying on your webmaster to complete updates to your website.
Either way you want to change information, keywords, pictures or contact information quickly. An up-to-date website brings more visitors and therefore more business.
Website statistics
Regularly reviewing website statistics is an important part of business on the internet. Knowing how many visitors your website had, how many visitors returned or looked at several pages, what they were looking for and how many contacted you to follow up on what they had seen will help evaluate your website design.
Additionally, if you have recently promoted your business in the press or with new printed material it is important to see what impact this promotion has had on website traffic.
If your website has lots of visitors but does not generate business your website design may not appeal, may be difficult to navigate or does not provide relevant information. This may indicate a need to look at your website design or the keywords chosen to promote your services.
If your website has few visitors maybe the search engines are unable to clearly identify the services or goods you are offering. Either of these problems is avoided with good website design.
Accessible
Accessibility is an important, often overlooked part of website design. Customers will be looking at your website with a variety of devices from PC’s to mobile phones and with a variety of browsers including text-only and speech browsers. Some will not use things like JavaScript or flash. Try to make your website design work for all of these combinations.
It is a legal requirement under the UK’s Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) to make all reasonable efforts to ensure your services are available to everyone regardless of any disabilities they have. This includes your website.
Useable
This sounds obvious but try to ensure the information on your website is clear and easy to find and the website navigation is easy to use. A rule of thumb for website navigation is that visitors be able to navigate from any page on your website to any other page with no more than 3 mouse clicks. On a large website an easily accessible ‘site map’ may be important to aid navigation. A site map is a page listing all the other pages of a website in a hierarchal order.
Another important part of ensuring your website is useable is to minimise the use of unexplained jargon and avoid using TLA’s ( Three Letter Abbreviations!) unless necessary. The code used for website design has special tags for abbreviations and acronyms.
Visible
A stunning website design is useless if it attracts no visitors. Most website owners understand the need to rank well on search engines but it is important to ensure you are ranked high for the correct search terms.
Search engines are not there to ‘promote’ your website. Their purpose is to identify websites relevant to the search term entered. Your website design can aid the search engines to understand your services and products. This is done by carefully selecting key words or phrases relevant to your business and telling them to the search engines. It is important the content on your pages also use these keywords. This is known as ‘keyword-rich-content’. This part of website design is known as ‘Search Engine Optimisation’ and you can optimise each page of your website for each of your products or services.
It is important your website is written using valid code with no errors. Invalid code can result in some search engines not indexing you website or your website behaving unexpectedly.
Effective
The bottom line is your website generates business or effectively informs a large audience. If you ensure your website is Accessible, Useable and Visible then it is probably effective. With a Manageable website you can measure how Effective your website is by analysing your website statistics.