Successful web sites offer something useful and compelling to its readership. This can range from a useful service, an online tool, great textual content, a vast online community, easy to digest video or image based material, or a compelling view point. Even the most successful web sites need to stay connected with its users and ensure the web site is constantly evolving to meet the users’ demands and needs. Even those of us with a lesser impressive visitor count need to ensure we remain connected with our visitors so we can make sure we are meeting the demands of our visitors, therefore ensuring our web site is as compelling as possible to entice other visitors and retain existing ones. One way to find out what our visitors think is through an online survey.
Creating the survey
There are existing online solutions for creating surveys, such as Survey Monkey. This option does allow you to build a limited survey for free, but if you intend to survey more than 100 people and have the freedom to ask them more than 10 questions it will cost a fee.
Another option is to ask your web site designer to create an online based survey for you, so a person can visit a page on your web site, fill in the survey, and the information is then saved in your database so it can be displayed to you in a secure manner. This option offers much greater freedom (in terms of the questions, layout and styling) but will cost you for the time taken by the web site designer. The survey will likely require server side code and interaction with a database, so the web designer would need to be familiar with a coding language such as PHP and SQL, and have knowledge of database management. Ask your web site designer if they are able to set up such a survey if you’d prefer this option.
Encouraging visitors to complete the survey
A great way to encourage visitors to complete the online survey is to include a link to it within your online newsletter. Newsletters are great tools for connecting with your visitors, and asking them for feedback can help strengthen this emotional connection. A large newsletter list can also deliver the survey to a vast amount of relevant people quickly and cheaply.
A link to the online survey would also be useful on the homepage, as well as exiting pages. Exiting pages are those pages which visitors tend to leave the web site from, and are often at the end of a process. For example; a person lands on the home page of a Salisbury web designer’s web site. The visitor looks at the design portfolio, looks at the text to see what is offered, and then finally navigates to the contact page to obtain a quote. The visitor is likely to leave after they have completed their task, so a survey would be ideally placed on this last page so the visitor can quickly let you know their thoughts before leaving. This would be ideal for classifieds web sites, as well as online shops. It may enlighten you as to why you have a low conversion rate, or why people are acting in a strange way on your web site (navigating away from the payment page when it’s time to pay, for example).
The survey itself should ideally be composed of a handful of closed questions, with one or two open questions where the visitor can expand if they wish. Try to ensure the survey can be completed within one to two minutes.
We can help you with an online survey
Webbed Feet UK is a group of professional web site designers based in Salisbury. We have designed and built an array of web sites for our satisfied clients across the United Kingdom and Europe since we were established in 2001. If you would like to discuss creating an online based survey, or any other web site design questions, please contact us.