People expect the experience that have on your web site to be as good as the last best online experience that they had elsewhere online. This means that the bar is continually being raised. New sites launch every day and new innovative techniques emerge to (hopefully!) make web sites easier to use.

To most people it’s all just the web. If site A has a really nice ticket booking procedure they don’t care that your site is older or built using a different technology. They just want it all to work well.

So how do you counter this continual pressure to have the best web site?

Start viewing the web through your web site owner’s eyes. As you use the web on a day to day basis, become aware of good practices and processes. Note down where you had a good experience, where something was easy to achieve a task or where your found something frustrating on someone else’s web site.

Have a policy of periodically assessing your own site and seeing things through a customers eyes. Make incremental changes. You don’t have to tear everything down and start all over again.

And remember, improving something doesn’t always have to mean the addition of a new feature. It could be the removal of some information or the streamlining of a process to make things more easy for your customers.