Do They Know What You're Doing?

If you run a genealogy web site, you probably (or maybe not) spend most of your time building the business by adding more content, or working on your marketing efforts to drive more traffic to you site. But do you ever ask yourself if the people arriving at your site understand what you're trying to offer them?

Many people (especially earlier this month while I was on a great genealogy tour) ask me what Genealogy Today is all about. And the more often I get asked, the better I get at answering. But, the better I get answering, the more I begin to realize that the Genealogy Today home page wasn't as successful at conveying the same message. [The home page has been improved since I wrote this post]

Often it's the evolutionary process that creates this disparity, so you should expect this to happen if you often engage in a variety of projects -- involving different type of information, or geared towards a slightly different audience.

There are plenty of articles out there on the topic of testing, but they typically measure success based on the number of visitors that complete a specific task. How do you measure whether or not someone understands what you're actually doing after they visit your web site?