Make it click

The best way to check if your website is easy to navigate is to get your mum to use it. And that’s advice from someone who knows what he’s talking about.
Irfan Makalic is a customer solutions engineer based at Google Australia’s head office in Sydney and he’s been passing on some tips of the trade to New Zealand web entrepreneurs Alan Jennings and Sidharta Bachtiar.
Jennings and Bachtiar own Dinein.co.nz, a website devoted to making it easier to have takeaway food for dinner. The website won a Google makeover contest run by Unlimited, and Jennings and Bachtiar recently spent a day at Google’s Pyrmont base picking the brains of the experts (either side of lunch, that is, served up by the company chef and eaten in a canteen with a spectacular view of Darling Harbour).
There was too much to do in just one day, so the foosball table, PlayStation and rock band stayed silent. Even the sleep pod and the prospect of a power nap didn’t offer any temptation.
“The first thing to always ask yourself is ‘what are the goals of the website?’” says Makalic getting straight to the point.
Jennings’ goal when he started Dinein.co.nz in 2008 was to be able to easily pick up takeaways on the way home after a long day at work. He was frustrated at eating the same old thing over and over again.
“I wanted something different but didn’t have the flyers on hand so didn’t want to ring up and not know what to order.”
He decided to develop an application that would enable owners of food and drink venues to have a customisable account where they could load menus, add images and advertise promotions. Potential customers would then log in to the site and look through the flyers and then phone through the order. After a disastrous experience with one web designer, Jennings used a Google search to find another, which is how Bachtiar joined the team.
“There are no set-up fees or monthly charges as we work on a commission model,” says Jennings. “Profits are wafer thin at the moment. That’s why we added on services such as web design, photography and content creation to support the industry. We want to monetise the site, but we need to get traffic there first, so we have to work out how to do that.”
Makalic’s key message to the pair was that a website has to be easy for users to navigate. And due to Dinein’s two distinct audiences — hungry customers as well as operators and owners of food and beverage outlets — it has to be even clearer. There has to be consistency with colours, fonts and the placement of objects across the pages. He suggested Google Analytics could be used to monitor how people were interacting with the site.
“Visitors should be able to find what they want straight away, so declutter it. Stick to some good design principles and then when you are done, give it to your mum to use. That will really let you know how user-friendly your website is.”
As part of their prize, Jennings and Bachtiar received $500 to spend on Google AdWords. With Google ads you only pay when people click on your ad, but that can prove an unnecessary expense if it’s not done properly. During their Google makeover, Jennings and Bachtiar were able to tap into six years’ worth of search engine optimisation (SEO) knowledge from Kate Conroy, an AdWords product specialist. “Straight away she pointed out that our keywords were too general,” says Jennings.
For instance one of their keywords was ‘Indian’, which means that word will pop up anytime someone types ‘Indian’ into a phrase, whether it’s ‘Indian Prime Minister’ or ‘Indian cricket’.
“You really have to align your ad to your key words.
It’s not like fashion where you shouldn’t match things; with AdWords you can never be too ‘matchy-matchy’,” says Conroy.