I am a big proponent of conducting regular website usability tests to see how people interact with your radio station’s site. In a website usability test, you put people in front of your site and ask them to perform basic tasks, like finding the address of the radio station. You’re trying to find out which tasks they have trouble completing. A test like this will shed light on some simple changes that could improve your site’s performance: eliminating a graphic, shortening some text, moving links to a different place, etc.
Once you’ve completed the test and decided what changes you want to make to your website, you need to communicate these changes to your webmaster. If you are not able to explain your vision clearly, you could waste hours of your time going back and forth with revisions.
You could try and describe all of your changes in an email, or print webpages and draw all over them with a marker, but there’s a better way. Let me introduce you to one of my favorite tools for communicating about website design changes:
Skitch is a free software program for Windows, Android, and iOS made by Evernote. The program allows you to capture an image of your screen and mark it up with text, arrows, shapes, and whatever else you might need. The you can copy the marked up images and paste them into an email or export them as a .jpg file.
Here’s an example using Skitch to mark up the old Jacobs Media Blog:
When a client asks me for feedback on their website design, I immediately open up Skitch and start mocking up screenshots. Within minutes, I’m able to accurately convey my ideas to web designers. Try it next time you want to make changes to your website.
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