It’s good to think about yourself once in awhile. Maybe a nice walk, relax outside by the BBQ, whatever it may be. But, when it comes to design and internet search you will only hurt your marketing efforts by tailoring them to yourself. Ignore the loudest or largest hippo in the room–they also may not be aware of how they are cuffing you to the gate as the others leave you behind.
Ask around your office, post a tweet, facebook update and ask how someone searches for something random like “How would you search if you wanted to make a chocolate cheesecake”. For the most part they’d be slightly different and so will the behavior of a user on your website (but i’ll touch on that in a bit). Back to the cheese cake question. I personally would search
“Recipes Chocolate Cheese Cake” and Google would correct me to “Cheesecake”, but there are a million and a half ways to ask this same thing to the search engines, and we’re finding people DEMAND Google to find their solutions: “tell me how to make a chocolate cheese cake” or “”chocolate”+”cheese”+”cake”+”recipe”" or “How-to make a chocolate cheese cake” or…or… you get the idea. So tailoring you’re website to I or Me doesn’t encompass the purpose of your site getting everyone but you to it…you already know its there–find the other 260 million Americans that haven’t heard of you.
This is no different when designing a website. Navigation placement is extremely important, as is keeping it consistent, but its function may be a last resort for some user. I go straight to it, if Google found the keywords I was looking for in or on your site I go straight to the navigation and look for the end results–if it’s not there, I leave. You get an average of 1/8th of a second to capture a viewers attention and you need to tailor to them all (I know, denoting) but don’t hamper yourself by always looking to “I” would do. My wife goes straight to the bottom footer and if not there, she MIGHT do a little reading because she’s a little more patient than I am;). But, someone in my office will spend the time to read the headers of the topics and/or read the information to ensure the info is or isn’t on the site they are looking for; others b-line it to the most dominate element. So when you’re sitting around brain-storming about how your site will interact and deliver relative content, remember the only I that matters is in cl-I-ent or the MonEy they spend (okay that ones was stretching it), but like I posted last week… TEST TEST TEST
