About Colette
Since 1998, Colette Mason has helped blue-chip companies succeed online with their household name websites. Now, she'd like to share her quick and easy, 100% jargon-free success techniques with you. She wants you to have a super-effective website for your business - and your customers!
Colette offers businesses a fresh perspective on websites, covering cutting-edge techniques, previously only available to big companies using expensive design agencies.
Ensuring a website is customer-focused is a critical part of any online business strategy. From domain names to taglines to menus to search buttons, Colette reviews and user tests websites for their ease of use for customers.
She has worked on web projects for multi-million dollar projects for blue-chip companies (the biggest was $500m), as well as ’mom and pop sites’, professional bodies, radio stations and more. She is available for consulting, mentoring and speaking engagements.
What's on this page...
My background
I got my first computer, aged 11 in 1981. I've used a computer almost every day since! I built my first website in 1996, for my own IT consultancy business, one of those basic "brochureware" sites describing what I did. I spent 2 years teaching myself new programming languages and getting to grips with the internet, reading heaps of thick books and rolling up my sleeves and learning to code.
In 1998 I had learned enough to become a fulltime programmer, working on some big projects. Over the next 6 six years I worked on major projects, reading more books and working with experts, analysing what they did.
In 2004, looking for new challenges, it had dawned on me there were a lot of websites out there that just weren't working - for the owners or the visitors, so I started analysing why websites don't work and what needs to be done to fix them. It seemed such a collosal waste of time and money to build sites that didn't meet business goals or help present or future customers. This new perspective, where the customer is central to how things are designed has been an amazing benefit - I apply these ideas to everything I do!
In 2009, I started to gather together all my knowledge and share my success strategies with more businesses, and set up this online consultancy to help more businesses turn around their website strategy, get rid of uncertainty and remove the risks to getting a website wrong.
My expertise
I specialise in analysing and understanding how people use information, the internet and their computers. The principles I teach are called "usability techniques" but I don't use that term very often because it's not a term my customers use!
I have spent a lot of time watching people and how they use "information" and "technology", seeing where they struggle with websites and software and asking them how systems can be improved. This means I can spot problems that IT systems have, such a poor navigation or confusing presentation or awkward steps to achieving something. I've also read a lot of books about the psychology of human-computer interaction, graphic design, user experience, usability testing, information architecture and interaction design.
The Website Success System shares this knowledge, but in a 100% jargon-free, business-orientated context - after all, I specialise in making sure information is easy to understand and easy to work with.
My client list
I have worked on lots of high-profile projects, 2 of them running into millions and hundreds of millions of pounds - where any mistakes are extremely risky and very costly - brought in as a specialist to make sure things ran smoothly. Here are some of the companies I've worked with.
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As well as the big companies, I have worked with small companies and individuals too - I can't resist an opportunity to make things"work better" for the people who have to use them :) I've covered that in the case studies section below. I think it's important for you to know these techniques work if you've got a millions to spend, or next to nothing.
My testimonials
Here's what customers said about the improvements I have made for my consultancy clients. This is an example from a £300m upgrade project for the biggest retail system in the UK looking after 98 BILLION transactions annually and used by 97% of the UK population each year - given this amount of transaction volume and the sheer expense from a project this big meant it was critical any changes I proposed to this very complicated system made it significantly better.
This was the feedback I got during the user testing:
- Wow, that was…wow! That was clever. It’s well thought out. The girls [in the office] are going to love that.
- Simple enough. Straight forward
- What I liked about it was [it was] very clear. As an inexperienced user it was intuitive and surprisingly straight forward to use.
- I loved that process. It was as easy as it could possibly be. You put it [the information] in and it just did. I liked that a lot. Very very good.
- That was superb it was excellent. Very straight forward. Even as an inexperienced user I found I went through that quite quickly.
- Oh that’s excellent, 20 out 10. Excellent. Excellent.
- That was really good. I really like that. I don’t have to scroll.
- That’s brilliant so much easier. It’s so much better than X [the old system].
- That was quite easy. [The new system] asked me all the things I expected to see.
- Considering that’s the first time I’ve done it, I fumbled a little [at the start] but that was spot on.
- It seemed to be working very very well. It was very user friendly and quicker than the existing system to put [the order] through.
- That was very nice. Very easy.
- I like that. Not being that familiar with the existing system, I found that exceptionally straightforward. It does what it said on the tin, it works. It took me where I wanted to be and the look and feel of the screens worked very well.
- I didn’t expect that. Well blow me down. It’s easy peasy.
- Definitely a 10 it was a straight-forward process not complicated at all.
- I think it’s fab. really good.
My Qualifications and Memberships
- Usability Professionals Association Member
- British Computer Society (MBCS) Member
- Information Architecture Institute Member
- Society of Technical Communications Member
- ACM (American Association for Computing Machinery) Member
- Internet Marketing Review Gold+ Member
- B.Sc (Honours) Economics
As a member of the Usability Professionals Association I adhere to their code of conduct.
- Act in the best interest of everyone
- Be honest with everyone
- Do no harm and if possible provide benefits
- Act with integrity
- Avoid conflicts of interest
- Respect privacy, confidentiality, and anonymity
- Provide all resultant data
If you want to contact me for any reason, just send a message via my contact form, I'll be delighted to hear from you.
