This is purely subjective, but I think the hardest part of making a site more usable is resources or peoplepower. Usability takes tweaking, measuring, studying, and more tweaking. There is a limit to how much tweaking to one website you can do, but then by the time you reach that limit you’ve probably already done a redesign or added new features. Usability optimizing could literally be a full time job. How many companies can afford to have a full-time usability person? Probably not many.

A bigger problem is when a small-company has a website contracted out for some exorbitant sum. Then they get their site usability tested, and almost immediately the next question they ask is “Ok, what do we do now?”. They find out there is about 100 small changes they can implement to make their site more usable and convert more. Now who is going to make these changes? Bill the shipping manager? I don’t think so. They have to go back to the same company that developed their site and ask them to make some changes, add this, do that, and move this over here. Good luck with that, especially if you’ve already paid them. IF they do want to help, you’ll probably rack up another huge bill.

Most brick-and-mortar stores that are trying to establish a web presence have no in-house web development staff and have are on a tight budget for contracted out web work. So what is a small company to do to make their site more usable? Quite honestly I don’t have a good solution. This is something I’ve always struggled with in my in-house SEO job. I’m busy planning the next step for web sites, thinking about the next great feature that will get people talking. I don’t have anybody I can hand a list of minor changes to and say, “lets try it like this”. At this time the only thing that has worked for me, is hiring a part-time employee / full-time college student that has web design experience to make changes on a development box. After we decided that we should go ahead and make the changes live, then it goes to our full-time programmer to make it happen.

I guess my point is here, that while we want to always be moving forward with our website, don’t forget to go backward and optimize usability and accessibility for the existing website. I do realize many companies don’t have the resources to make this happen, but the only thing I can tell you is that you have to spend money to make money. Hire someone whose sole job is to tweak and test the website. This will take the grunt work out of it, while you’re busy doing more important things, like masterminding your future website strategy.