These top ten web site design tips can help you build a site your customers will buy from again and again.
More and more small businesses are realizing that having a web site
is no longer an option. It’s a necessity. Consumers, businesses and
government buyers all use the web to buy products and services directly
and to research those purchases they will eventually make offline
through more traditional means.
Having a web site and profiting from it don’t necessarily go hand-in-hand, however. In fact, some web sites are so poorly designed and constructed that they drive
customers away instead of getting them to open their wallets wide. You
can minimize that problem by following these basic principles of sound
web site design and navigation.
1. Don’t hide what you sellIn many instances,
the "content" that visitors want is information about the product they
want to buy. If you make it difficult to find your shopping area, if
your pages take a long time to load, or if visitors can't find your
order form, they will either give up or go shop in your competitor's
online store.
To improve the shopping experience for the customer, try to keep each
page to no more than 40K. If you use graphics, use thumbnails with the
descriptive text. The thumbnail-sized photos can be setup as clickable
links to larger versions of the photo for anyone who wants to see them
enlarged
If you sell a lot of different items, try to classify them in some
way to make them easier to find. For instance if you were selling office
supplies, you might have one category called "paper and stationery,"
another called "Writing instruments" another called software, etc.
2. Make it look professionalIt wasn't long ago,
that just having a web site was enough to make a small businesses and
home businesses look more professional. It didn't much matter what the
web site actually looked like. But that's changing. While there are
still some pretty ugly web sites that are relatively successful,
customers, for the most part expect a company's web site to be as neat
and professional looking as their printed sales literature and marketing
materials. Anything less than a professional façade for your online
shop, will make your business look small and unreliable.
3. Make your site easy to navigateBusinesses and
consumers today have little time to waste. If they can't find what they
want quickly on your site they'll move on. To help them find their way
around, put a table of content (often called a navigational bar or
navbar) on your home page. Include a search function for the web site as
well.
4. Encourage browsing and impulse buysRetail
stores get you to purchase more merchandise by putting sale merchandise
at some distance from the cash register (so you have to walk through the
store and see more things you may want to buy). They also increase
sales by putting items that make good impulse buys in places that you
pass through to get out of the store. Fast food stores and supermarkets
often have candy and magazines near the check out counter. Clothing
stores may have socks, jewelry or perfume near the cash register.
You can use similar tactics on your web site to increase product
sales. For instance, if you have an article on how to choose digital
cameras, create a small ad for digital cameras if you sell them and put
it in the margin of the article. If you sell books, write short book
reviews and put a link in each book review to a place on your site where
the reader can buy the book you are reviewing. Another tactic: run
banner ads for your own own products on editorial pages on your web
site. These ads will work like ads on the window of your favorite
supermarket. They'll remind visitors of goodies you have in other parts
of your web site.
5. Suggest add-on sales One of the easiest ways
to increase sales is to let customers who are about to make a purchase
know about related products they may want to buy. If your shopping cart
software allows it, include one or two links to related products from
the shopping cart screen. If you can’t easily do that, include the link
to related products on a thank you page.
6. Give them ordering choices Not everyone is
comfortable giving out credit card information over the Internet, and
not everyone likes to shop with a credit card. To maximize your sales,
be sure you give customers alternate methods for making a purchase. In
addition to your online order form, provide a way for people to order by
telephone, by fax and by mail. Make those options easy to find, too. If
your customer has to hunt for ways to make a purchase, you'll lose
sales.
If you find too many customers use call, fax or mail their order,
consider adding a surcharge for orders that aren't placed
electronically. Or, increase your prices slightly and then offer a
discount for ordering online.
7. Tell them how to reach youCustomers want to
know who you are and how they can contact after they've made a purchase.
And they want that information to be easy to find. If it isn't they may
question your honesty or credibility and move on to a competitor's web
site to make their purchase.
You can avoid that trap by by having a "contact us" button on every
page of your web site. The "Contact us " button can lead to a web page
that lists your business name, business email address, telephone, fax
and other information customers may need to know. If you don't want to
take the calls yourself, have an answering service take them for you.
Tip: Remember the Internet is "on" 24 hours a day, 7 days a week.
People can and do use it all night long. If you don't have someone
answering phones 24 hours a day, be sure to indicate your hours of
operation and your time zone with your contact information.
8. Include a feedback formA feedback form serves
three purposes. First, it gives your customers another way to reach
you. Second, it lets you know what customers think about your products
and services and what they wanted but can't find. Finally, the feedback
form is good for public relations. Having it on your site will help
customers form an impression of your company as one that cares what it's
customers have to say.
Put the feedback form where people can find it easily on your web site. This might be on a navigational menu, or as a text link.
9. Read and answer email at least once a dayOne
of the leading attractions of the Internet is its immediacy. You can
find information, shop for products, send and receive letters, place
orders, send invoices, view pictures, and access documents 24 hours a
day, seven days a week. But that's also one of the leading disadvantages
of the web – at least for web site owners. Because the web and online
services are available 24 hours a day, visitors expect them to be
staffed around the clock, too. If they have a question, they expect to
get a response in hours, rather than days as they might if they sent a
question to your company using traditional mail.
To keep customers happy, therefore, plan to answer all email within
24 hours or less. If you don't answer your email in a timely fashion,
your customers are likely to have little difficulty finding one of your
competitors on the web.
10. Help people who stumble into your web site find their way backWhen
visitors find your web site, they may save or print some of your
information to read at a later time. When they find that information
later on, they may want to return to your site. To make sure they can
find their way back, be sure that every page on your site includes the
name of your web site, your phone number and your URL on the bottom of
the page. To avoid typing that information in manually on every page
include it on the bottom of whatever template you use to create web
pages.
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