In order to provide the best information to your web design staff you need to elicit constructive web site feedback.  You also need feedback to determine how well the designer—even if you are the designer—has done the work of setting up an effective website to present and market your products and services.  

You need to know precisely what the overall view is of your web site. Feedback from your customers will help in responding to concerns and both you and your staff will feel great about what is working well already. You need to know whether your potential customers found the website helpful, easy to use, complete and attractive.  All these are factors which will either drive the customers away, or keep them coming back for more good information and products.   

In order to receive good web site feedback, you need to design and ask good questions. It is an expectation in designing questions for a survey form that questions which can be answered by a yes or no usually will be, even though that response does not help in the least to acquire good web site feedback.  For instance, if you want to know if the customer found your web site easy to use, you might want to ask the customer to rate your web site on a scale of 1 to 10 on ease of usage.  In this way you will have a quantification of the web site feedback. A ratio of 40% open-ended or descriptive questions provides a fairly effective mix of questions to elicit good web site feedback.     

Don’t eliminate the yes/no questions entirely, you can use the scales and then ask the customer to tell you why he answered as he did. This will allow more descriptive information if the customer chooses to expand on his answers, while not forcing long and detailed reiteration of questions in many ways. If the person taking the survey or providing feedback gets bored with the questions, it won’t do much for the positive image of your website which you have worked so hard to portray. 

Web site feedback should be sought from a variety of sources. Don’t forget though, your existing customers are the ones who have made you successful and they should be an excellent source of good web site feedback. You can periodically survey your existing customers, even if it is only one or two questions. Offer them a reason to complete the survey and you will make them even more pleased to provide web site feedback for you.    

A focus group will help to capture good web site feedback for you.  Ask friends or family members for their views on your web site.  A mentor is always a good source for feedback. If you choose your focus group carefully and ask for and listen carefully to web site feedback which they provide, you will often have a fairly representative sample of how potential customers will feel about the effectiveness of your web site.