When you build a website it is not just a matter of build it and expect that visitors will arrive and start buying. There are a lot of little extra bits that you need to remember to include to make an effective website.
What is an effective website?
An effective website is one in which plenty of people are finding the site and a good number of these can find their way around the website and ultimately make a purchase or contact you about your services. An ineffective website may have little or no traffic and a lot of this will bounce - leave almost immediately without actually becoming a paying customer.
So what are the secrets of an effective website?
1. Make sure people are finding you.
Just because you have built a website, or have had a professional web designer build it for you, does not mean that the site will jump to the top of the search engines and be found and visited by hordes of people. Work is still needed and a lot of it!
You need to make sure that you are spreading the word of your website far and wide, through social media networking, forums, blogs, articles and so on. Do not tell anyone that you exist and your website is going to fail.
2. Make sure that people can find what they want.
If the visitors are arriving looking for products, make sure that these products can be found. Regularly check your website traffic statistics and see what terms people are searching for to find your website and this will give you a clue as to what they want. Go to the page that they are landing on and see if it is clear from there where to go.
Check your statistics for any keywords with high bounce rates - they could be irrelevant but they could equally well be struggling to find what they want. If this is the case, then maybe a well placed small banner can keep them on track.
Add a search function to your website to make sure that anyone struggling to find what they want can find what you have on offer - you might be surprised at how many purchases result from search results within your website.
And split down large pages so that the important information is easy to find and at hand. Make correct use of headers, bold and other highlights to steer visitors around the page.
3. Make sure that these visitors can go on to make a purchase.
I have seen ecommerce website designs that have missed a link back to the shopping basket. This is fine if your visitors are only ever going to buy one item at a time, but if they go looking for more products, which they can't find, you still want them to complete the purchase.
Do not hide tax and postage information. If this is suddenly added to the final charge the surprise can put a lot off. Spell out additional charges early on, maybe even offering to reduce them with larger sales.
And whether you are an ecommerce website or not, make your contact details clear. Some people do not like phoning and others do not like contact forms. Whilst others cannot click on an email link and open it as they only ever email through webmail. So give a multitude of contact methods so that they can contact you the way that they prefer.
That's it. My secrets of website design for an effective website.
Website Designs Secrets - What Makes an Effective Website
Keith Lunt owns Janric Website Design. If you want to know more about internet marketing, call across to the internet marketing blog and pick up a copy of our free internet marketing ebook!
watches cell phone Cheap Beck Arnley 104 1256 Transmission Mount Best
No comments:
Post a Comment