Nora Brown Design

Review your FAQ's

The most recent issue of my favorite web design publication, A List Apart has a great article called Infrequently Asked Questions of FAQs. Most small business and e-commerce websites have an FAQ page, and this article poses some excellent questions about their utility, and provides some guidelines.

Recommendations for successful FAQ pages

• Include questions that really are frequently asked. This means keeping track of what your potential customers and other visitors to your site are asking. This can come from face-to-face interaction or support requests. In addition, the article proposes actually putting a form at the bottom of your FAQ page which asks something like: “Didn’t find your question here? Let us know.”
• Don’t make your FAQ page your first line of defense. If questions are being asked over and over, your main content is falling short. See if you can revise it to provide the information visitors to your site are looking for.
• Don’t include sales- or promotion-oriented questions, like “Has ABC Widgets one any awards for its products?”
• Keep the answers as short and simple as possible.
• Keep the page organized. If you have a lot of FAQs, consider dividing them into categories.

Conclusion

Take a look at your FAQ page and ask yourself:

• Are the questions and responses still current?
• Could any of them be answered better in the main site content?
• Do they have the right, helpful tone?
• Would the page benefit from a feedback form?