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Your Web Site Is a Deck of Cards

First, let me create an imaginary scenario.

Imagine you have a web site through which you sell multiple products or services. These products or services fall neatly into three separate categories.

And let's say your site has exactly 52 pages in total.

Print out each page onto a card the size of a playing card. (I know, that's a small size. But for the sake of the analogy, bear with me.)

Now I'm going to put you on a stage in front of an audience of thousands, and I'm going to ask you to invite a volunteer up onto the stage.

Now shuffle and fan out the playing cards...your web site...as if you were doing a conjuring trick, and say to the volunteer, "Pick any card".

This is how your web site works

We like to think of our web sites as having a beginning, a middle and an end.

In the comfort of our cubicles we start at our home page, look through some second and third level pages and end up on the checkout page.

But that isn't how your visitors experience it. Through inbound links and search engine listings they can and do enter your site at a variety of different pages.

Back to the stage

Your volunteer looks at the card and, happily, is really interested in that product category. She wants to know more.

Seeing her interest, you say, "Pick any other card".

"I beg your pardon?" She replies. "I want more information on these kinds of products. I don't want to pick just any card. I want a card that tells me more."

You scratch your head and say, "Hang on a minute". You run back stage and grab four colored markers. You quickly color the backs of the cards according to the three categories, and use the fourth color to identify all your company pages - the home page, About, Contact and the like.

Then you run back on stage and add the appropriate color to the card your volunteer is holding.

Now your volunteer knows how to identify the related cards...or pages

"Pick any card," you say. She picks another card of the same color as the first one.

Unfortunately, she picked the checkout page. And that's not what she wanted at all. She wanted more information on the product category. She's not happy.

"Hmmm", you say. And run back stage again.

Now with a black pen you write numbers on each of the cards in each category. Number one for the category "home page", number two for the next page in the information and sales pathway and so on.

Now you have a deck of cards that are color coded to identify the major categories and are numbered so people can figure out where to start.

You go back on stage.

"Pick any card."

She picks the number one card in the category that caught her interest. (Even although it turns out that the card she first picked is now marked number six.)

How well would YOUR site perform with that volunteer?

Books, magazine and catalogs have front covers followed by sequential pages. People generally start with the front cover and move forward from there.

Not so with web sites. Visitors arrive at interior pages all the time. On some sites the home page isn't even the most frequently used entry point into the site.

The idea that a web site has a beginning, middle and end is a convenient construct of our own. But it is not how web sites are used and experienced by our visitors.

The typical user experience is less like picking up a paper catalog, and a lot more like being presented with a shuffled deck of cards and being asked to pick any card.

Start using those virtual markers and pens

Help people understand where they are in your site. And help them find where they want to go next. Use design, color, text...whatever it takes.

And yes, I know that many sites have thousands of pages and are a lot more complex than the deck of cards analogy allows for. But the principle remains the same. You're just working with a really, really big deck of cards.

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