What Makes People Click: Advice

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What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web
The following was prepared as part of a Demonstration held at TESOL 2003, Baltimore, MD, USA, in April. Go to the Main page to see the rest or take a look at work that has already been done for previous presentations:
[ Resources for Program Marketers ][ Program webpages (TESOL 2001) ] [ Bibliography ]

Advice: What to Strive For, What to Avoid

What to strive for:

In Design (see Ch. 5):

1. Make your pages accessible by as many as possible. We never know who will be a customer, or what machine they may be using.

2. Make your pages simple and powerful. Homepages should draw people in, make them feel at home, and make them understand clearly and quickly what you offer and why they would like it.

3. Make important pages printable. Imagine your prospective student in an internet cafe. He needs to take the price page home to show his parents. Some design-minded person, however, has made it white on black. Bad!

4. Make your headings and page titles incorporate key words while still accurately showing what pages are about.

In System Management (see Ch. 4):

5. Keep your pages maintainable. Put up only what you can keep up and keep maintained; no linkrot.

6. Make important information about your program easy to get Some users are casual window-shoppers; don't detain them. Don't underestimate the subtle disadvantage of making people come three or four clicks into your system just to find a simple fact. As shallow as possible; as intuitive as possible; and as clearly stated as possible.

7. Control the way you present your hometown, or if necessary, your university. Make a page that shows your town as you'd want internationals to see it. Use your ESL skills to put yourself in their shoes.

8. Make pages that are useful to people, especially students. Make pages timeless, so they won't get outdated the minute you turn your back; keep your own maintenance to a minimum.

In Getting it Out There (see Ch. 7):

9. Use your own homepage as your primary vehicle of marketing. Don't rely on marketers to represent you well or carefully, although you can work to influence that too.

10. Work to make your webpage appear on various searches at various appropriate times, not when users are looking for a vacation, but when they are looking for an English program. The secret to successful marketing is being at the right place at the right time.

11. Work to make every search engine know where you are and how to find you; make yourself doorways so that different language search engines can come through with a little help and find themselves in a new but friendly environment.

12. Seek out links to your institution and its pages. Make people want to link to your site or sites for various reasons.

13. Make yourself accessible from your host institution. Give the impression of being well-connected to it; they know about you and link to you often; you link to them in important places. For example, make it easy for users to get to admissions (a link or two away) and apply.

14. Keep in mind your value proposition (see Ch. 2)....what is it that makes your program better than others? Does this shine through as you click through the pages? If not, why not?

15. Sow your w's. Be proud of your webpages; put them on your business cards, your brochures, and everywhere you go. If they work, be happy when people stumble upon them.

Miscellaneous:

16. Don't stop thinking about the future. It worked for Clinton. It'll work for you.

What to Avoid:

In Design (see Ch. 5):

1. Crowdedness. Blink is evil. Times Square is not where you go to get an education, at least not the kind we are considering here. Why make a page that is jam-packed and busy, with flashing lights everywhere? Spinning globes, flashing lights, and dancing envelopes prevent people from concentrating when they read; the more shallow they are, the less likely they'll connect or come back. Small type is a kind of busy-ness, and also prevents people from connecting or wanting to stay.

2. Making your user have Flash or other plug-ins just to open the main page. This prevents lots of people from entering your sites and makes some who enter accidentally, without warning, angry. Don't make your customers angry. Save your fancy pages for internal links where you can warn them and they'll avoid it if they know they can't get the plugins they need.

3. Pictures that take too long to load. Three quarters of the world may wait longer than you do for pictures, and/or payh for the experience of waiting. The picture(s) on your main page should be simple and easy to load, so that they don't prevent users from getting at the important information. Larger pictures should be at the bottom of the page for the same reason. For accessibility reasons, pictures shouldn't carry too much content.

4. Excessive dryness; no pictures; no character. Don't be afraid of pictures; they are really the best way of giving people a sense of who you are and what you do. Fear of them will cause failure to connect with your students. Putting all your details on your main page also assumes that everyone who is there really wants to read the whole thing. They don't. Draw them in; don't make them feel like they're getting your whole story while standing in your doorway.

5. Pages that cause ordinary machines to crash. I can't say that I know what does this, but I've had some e-mails that make my Netscape crash, and I'm not usually in a very good mood while I wait for my old machine to start over again. My impression is that again this is caused by the assumption that everyone is as up-to-date as the designer, when in fact, almost nobody is.

6. Ineffective internal search. This is related to obscure organization, in that occasionally a user wants a certain piece of information, and it's there somewhere, but they are unable to get at it. An effective style of organization is to make every page go back to the homepage, and make the homepage have clear, well marked paths to all information, so that it's relatively intuitive for even limited-English speakers to find what they're looking for.

7. Link problems: unnecessary, or duplicate, links; links that take the user out of the system without warning them (1); links that make the user's machine do something he/she wasn't prepared for; "mailto" links that aren't marked as e-mail links.

8. Type problems: type too small to read (2); type in difficult contrast with background (3); horizontal scrolling required to view difficult or complex text, so that the reader is constantly on the horizontal bar.

In System Management (see Ch. 4):

9. Broken internal links. Linkrot is bad for many reasons (see Ch. 4).

10. Pages where, believe it or not, you can stumble upon them, read and like them, yet still not have a clue who made them, why, when, or for what program. Some pages have no links to anywhere, leaving the user with no option but the back button, and the impression that he/she is in the wilderness somewhere, with no choice but to return to civilization.

11. Pages that are never seen, because nobody links to them, or the search engines can't find them. What good is a good product, if nobody knows about it?

Footnotes:

Sources:

DiBeneditto, L. (2002), And God said: Let there be no more Linkrot. http://www.dibeneditto.com/resources/20020718/

Jordan, K. (2002, Nov. 12). How to integrate keywords into your web site copy. Search Engine Guide.
http://www.searchengineguide.com/kalena/2002/1112_kj1.html

Nielsen, Jakob (2002). Top Ten Web-design mistakes of 2002. Alertbox 12/23/2002. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/20021223.html.

Nielsen, Jakob (1999). Ten Good Deeds in Web Design. Alertbox 10/3/99 http://www.useit.com/alertbox/991003.html.

Nielsen, Jakob (1998). Fighting Linkrot. Alertbox 6/14/98. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/980614.html.

Nielsen, Jakob (1996). Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design. Alertbox 5/96. http://www.useit.com/alertbox/9605.html.

Search Engine Forums (n.d.)Top 10 ways to irritate your visitors, Search Engine Forums (an introduction to what NOT to do). http://gethighforums.com/Forum7/HTML/000264.html.

Copyright Thomas Leverett, 2003

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Page made and maintained by
Thomas Leverett, CESL, SIUC
Photo above (Spider Web) by Jim Leverett.

What Makes People Click:Marketing an IEP Program on the Web

Advice: What to Strive For, What to Avoid

What to strive for:

What to Avoid:

What Makes People Click:
Marketing an IEP Program on the Web