Apartheid is a bad thing. But I am afraid you need apartheid for your website. You have to start treating different people in different ways.
Usability
I don’t have to tell you the usability of your website is a serious issue. Good usability improves how visitors experience your website. At the end of the day it improves your sales and at the same time the workload of your sales people is reduced. So the knife cuts two ways.
You may have a problem
But I think usability is a relatively small problem compared to another problem you are facing. This other problem is the way your website approaches the visitors and what contents is offered to them.
Or better, the problem is the fact that different people with different information needs visit your website. There are people that don’t know you and your products or services yet and there are people that already know almost everything about you. Besides you have to deal with end-users, wholesalers, service-engineers, purchasers, maintenance people and system-designers. And they all have specific pieces of information they are looking for. And they often need to be treated in a different way.
You have to make it possible for all these people to find their information in an appealing format and only a few clicks away from your homepage.
Because you need to keep an eye on the usability of the site at the same time, you may have a problem.
More than one website
What you need to do is identify a visitor at an early stage of the visit and get your visitor to a place on your website where specific information is presented in a appropriate way. There are ways to generate different content for different visitors. But these solutions may be to technical for you or for the content management system you are using.
An easy solution is to build two or more separate websites or sub-sites. Then you can let the visitor decide on your homepage which sub-site to go to based on his interests or function. The advantage is also that you are able to use the addresses of you sub-sites in your newsletter, your e-mail signature or whatever to direct people directly to what is of interest for them.
Treat them differently
The bottom line is that you really need to start thinking hard about who is looking for what information on your website. Then start treating people differently. In this case it will not harm them.
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