Delete it!

Lesson 8 concentrated on the importance of effective Web design. According to Gerry McGovern, founder and CEO of Customer Carewords and New Thinking e-mail newsletter, deleting unnecessary and outdated content from your Web site is very important to customer satisfaction.

Why?

“Most customers come to your Web site to complete top tasks. The more irrelevant and out-of-date pages of content you have, the greater the chances they will arrive on these pages,” he explained. “There is simply nothing worse than presenting a customer with useless content. It infuriates them, wastes their time, and drives them away from your Web site like a plague.”

“Every time I hear the word "redesign" I shiver a little,” McGovern continued. “The Web site has grown more and more useless because of badly managed and out-of-date content. Management should have mandated the boring, politically difficult and thankless work of regularly removing poor quality content.”

McGovern said that, instead, many Web managers—particularly the newly appointed ones—want to do a redesign, but that a redesign is certainly not always the solution to a more effective Web site.

References:

McGovern, Gerry. “Want to improve your Web site? Delete your content.” Ragan Communications. 22 Dec 2008. View the entire article