You Must Facilitate Findability
Findability is the general ability of your web site to enable visitors to find content and services on your site via navigation and search. Low findability means they can't find anything and high findability means that it is effortless to locate and access content on your web site.
Associations must develop competencies in facilitating findability. Most groups have large content collections that members want to access. Poor findability hides all of that value. Associations who are successful at findability will pay attention to their search engines, constantly tuning them based on usage and results. They will highlight content prominently based on their regular business cycles. They will talk about findability every day.
What is the findability of your association web site?
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Comments
I fear it's not that great for some of our content. Any suggestions on how to improve findability?
-Michelle
Posted by: Michelle | June 20, 2006 4:20 PM
I'd recommend a usability study, if it all possible. We conducted one a year or so back that was an eye-opener. By working with user focus groups as they tried to find things on our site (as well as a survey that went out to a broader group), we learned all kinds of things we were able to put to immediate use. For instance: We were using graphics and images to draw people to new information and hot topics on our site. We learned that users were interpreting those graphics as advertising and skipping right over them. By dropping the images and just using well-chosen text (short, active phrases) we were able to draw many more people to important information on the site.
We also recently re-organized the whole site, cutting away hundreds of pages of deadwood in the process. That makes it a lot easier to find what's left, and also makes it easier for us to keep things up to date.
We worked with Ellipsis Partners for our study, and I'd recommend them highly; I know there are other groups that do usability work as well.
Good luck with improving findability on your site!
Posted by: Lisa Junker | June 20, 2006 6:18 PM
Thanks so much! I'll look into it.
-Michelle
Posted by: Michelle | June 22, 2006 4:52 PM
You should check out the article I have in the Tech supplement with this month's Associations Now, titled 'Homepage Battlefield'. I talk about a lot of things you can do that contribute to enhanced findability.
I do think you can do a lot to improve findability every day without investing in focus groups and usability studies if you want to get started immediately.
Posted by: David Gammel | June 27, 2006 9:34 AM