On Tuesday I published an update to the Top 30 most highly-rated Support pages.. as voted by you, using our 'smiley face' feedback forms. For the first time, I included a list of the most poorly rated pages using data for the month of April, meaning to have a 'worst 30'.
Thing was, after the first 6 or so pages that people have problems with, the rest were becoming so middling as to make ordering by quantity of dissatisfaction fairly meaningless. The bottom of the barrel then, when it comes to how you rate the usefulness of our support pages, can be adequately summarised in a table of 10 significant pages.
These pages most commonly fall into areas where customers are looking to find a way to talk to our support staff. In such circumstances the Help Assistant and our (gentle) push towards self-help is often found a hindrance rather than a help. We are always looking at ways in which we can better develop our online experience, striking a balance between taking an educative role about just what IS available online and being responsive to our customer’s requests for assistance.
We’ve tried to design the Help Assistant in such a way as to take you to the right place for your enquiry; first choose the category in which you are having a problem and then, if you can't find the answer right there, you can then ask a Question to the support team for that area. I recognise that many customers are following a trail that has ultimately concluded that they need to ‘raise a ticket’ or ‘ask a Question’ and that it is not obvious what this means at first pass. This is something that I’ll be looking at improving over the next couple of weeks.
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Reading Dean’s post about SEO snakeoil it reminded of just how much of this latest SEO whirlwind is simply awareness of some basic rules of web & content design that us old-timers have known about since the hey-day of Alta Vista. In fact we’ve still got a basic guide to getting higher rankings in Search Engines that I first wrote in (casts mind back.. what?..) 1999? We re-used this guide when we created the Website Wizard in 2001 as well. I’m thinking it is in need of an update.. (add this one to our to do list guys!)
That’s not to say we haven’t got anything new to learn about SEO.. rather the opposite in fact. What the media calls Web 2.0 is just how the Internet works to the kids of today. Who makes a website these days apart from web designers anyway? It’s all blogs and social networks. And look at me - blogging. Who’d’ve thought it?
