Rating your website: What makes a great website? The short answer is 'one that achieves your goals.' It should also be useful and easy to navigate.

• Author: Sablosky, Tanja Lian
• Position: Feature

Although most bank products and services are alike, there are no two bank websites that are quite the same. Each has a personality, format and content unique to the bank. So how do you rate websites? And what makes an outstanding one?

To analyze and evaluate your bank's site, you must first determine what the primary goal is, says Joe Sullivan, CFMP, president and founder of Market Insights Inc., Chicago, and an instructor of online banking at the ABA School of Bank Marketing & Management in Boulder, Colo. For example, do you want the site simply to deliver information? Promote and encourage online banking? Allow customers to sign up for products online? Once the goal is clear, identify what your target market is.

Your site must be relevant and valuable to the user, according to Stephen Thompson, vice president of creative at Agency.Com, in his recent Web seminar ("webinar") 'Analyze That," which dealt with websites. If your site is useful, the customer may come back, but to improve those chances, your site must also be usable. If your site is too difficult to navigate, or if it is too hard to find answers, customers will leave. If your pages take too long to load, that will affect users' perception of your site's usability. They are always just one click away from a competitor's site, says Thompson.

Your site should also clearly reflect your brand, provide added value to visitors and get them as close to a sale as possible. The following is a discussion of four important suggestions for good website quality.

1. Make it both useful and usable

   To make the most impact with today's tech-savvy Web surfers, choose an easy and efficient format. Too many bank websites are crowded with data, making it difficult to pick out your most important messages, says Sullivan. "People are drowning in information, but are thirsty for knowledge." Weather information and the latest press releases take up a lot of space on some sites, which may detract from moving visitors quickly to your bank products and services, or to their accounts. Your site should be clean and easy to navigate. Also, be sure every function works smoothly, says Sullivan. One of the top complaints he's heard is that users can't easily print out pages in their entirety. Usability also means removing obstades to information, such as requiring registration and passwords to access calculators.

2. Reflect your bank's brand

   Your site is an extension of your branch network, your marketing materials and your media placements. Therefore, your site should reflect the company's brand with the right choice of colors (ideally no more than three), graphics and type, says Sullivan. If there is an image that your bank uses that is easily recognizable, incorporating that into graphics helps reinforce the connection between your physical locations, your printed materials and your online site.

   Keep your site efficient. Focus on doing a few things well, says Sullivan. The downfall of some websites is offering too many choices and graphics, which can detract from branding and confuse the visitor. Thompson points to one site that had over 30 choices on the first page. One trend in site design is to incorporate moving graphics that flip from one message to another or continuously rotate as you scroll down the page. Sullivan cautions that...