By Allan Maurer

MCLEAN, VA – If you spend much of your time, effort and money working on your web site’s landing page, you’re probably missing a major opportunity to capture more attention from your visitors. So says Kelley McDonald, director of Information Architecture with Navigation Arts, a McLean, VA-based web design and development company.

“Most traffic goes to content pages within your site,” McDonald tells us. “Only 15 percent goes to the landing page.” Nevertheless, it can be difficult to get clients to listen when he tells them that, McDonald admits.

“Three quarters of the doors through which people come into your site are content pages. You’re missing a big opportunity by not thinking about how to serve people where they are actually landing,” he says. “Think of Google as your homepage. People experience you through your content pages and they don’t march through your site as if they’re in a house.”

If our own analytics are any guide, McDonald is right on with his. Half our traffic comes from search engines and almost all goes to content pages rather than our landing page.

Design from the inside out

How do you take advantage of knowing people arrive at content pages rather than a landing page?

“Design from the inside out,” says McDonald. “Ask yourself how you can build on the question that brought them to the content? It’s important to have highly relevant links to other content that builds on the user’s question.”

That doesn’t mean services that automatically provide links to somewhat relevant content, he adds.

He also recommends avoiding “happy talk.” It’s all the “Hi, welcome to our site, we’re here to server your needs,” type of copy so prevalent on business sites. “It’s a highly ignorable block of text that people quickly gloss over,” says McDonald.

More technically, he also suggests separating content from its display, creating relationships between objects and systematically relating pages.

It’s not magic

There will always be a large percentage of users who come to a site for one item and leave, he notes. “We don’t think you’ll ever catch more than 35 percent (to click on other content).” But the idea is to “Move the dial closer to what you want.”

“The key thing is relevancy. It’s more about the content than technique.” Eye-tracking studies show where people look and where they don’t, but “It all comes down to content people need or want and what’s relevant to them,” McDonald says. “It’s about taking that extra step to connect things. I don’t think it’s magic.”

Treat ads as content

The same concept works regarding advertising on the web, he says. “Advertising online is in many ways a blind spot for people. Studies show people avoid it if it looks the least bit like advertising. Eye-tracking shows them avoiding ad spaces.”

Making ads more relevant and more digital increases the chances that people will engage with the ad,” he points out.

“It’s about personalization and localization,” he adds. “If you can serve up ads related to the user and what his questions are (that brought him to the content), and if  they’re treated and shaped more like content, they work better. If they’re shaped like print ads, no amount of trickery will work.”

“The user experience is the bread and butter of what we do at Navigation Arts,” McDonald says. The 70-employee company includes 19 information architects.

McDonald is one of more than 50 Internet and digital media experts who will converge on Tysons Corner, VA, Oct. 18 for the first Digital East event.

Diversified DC market good to the company

McDonald tells us the Navigation Arts founders, who ran and sold Bethesda-based Iconics during the dot com boom era, wanted to “Give it another go and focus on quality.”

They filed their company papers the day before Sept. 11, 2001 at the Watergate Hotel, but despite those inauspicious beginnings, established a solid reputation in the Mid Atlantic region, Houston, and upper MidWest.

“The DC market has been good to be in for user experience,” says McDonald. “There are so many different kinds of organizations here. It’s the capital of non-profits, there’s the federal government, telecom startups, and different startups in Northern Virginia.”

That multi-faceted DC economy means that during the downturn, Navigation Arts business “Didn’t skip a beat, we had irons in the fire with so many different buyers, all focused on the user experience.”

Designed city portals

While the company doesn’t pretend to be a large government IT integrator, it does find projects where it can have a big impact, McDonald says. “We look for projects such in e-government, anything that is citizen-facing.”

It’s been working on a major project, not yet live, for the State Department consulates to streamline its processes to make finding information on Visas, passports and fraud much easier and faster, for instance.

It also redesigned the Charlotte Observer’s Charlotte.com site to make it more focused on social media, and a city portal site for Richmond, VA.

“Both have done well and we created each in two months from inception to launch,” McDonald says.

The Navigation Arts site follows the company’s own advice. It is user friendly and offers lots of short videos, including several by McDonald, on improving user experience and other topics.