The assumption we have is a beautiful website with a lot of traffic will sell more goods - End of discussion, right?
Imagine if Internet traffic were suddenly metered and your website is granted exactly 100 human visitors a month. Is your conversion rate high enough to cover your bills on that volume of traffic?
Optimize your design
- Homepage impact - Do people get a feeling from your website from 5 feet away? Most visitors will not read your introduction so your home page must instantly establish a basis of trust with your target audience through visual impact or your visitor will flee. Change your text to Greek - does it still say "art, business, bank, family or mother" to you?
- Architecture - Stand back and take a good look at your content. Now, throw out any old or duplicate content and architect your navigation in a logical manner to lead visitors down the path to contacting you. Supermarkets provide shopping carts at the entrance and a checkout at the exit. Everything in between is logically oriented - your site should do the same.
- Short messages - State your point and link to more information. Opinions conflict but you have somewhere around 200-300 words to say your piece before your visitor moves on. Quickly state your point and provide an outlet for the next step.
- Get their attention - Bold text on a plain page goes a long way to attract the eye. Highlight a point and combine it with a call to action.
- Keep their attention - Keep choices to a few. Consider every path through your website to be a store hallway. If visitors are moving towards a goal, do not distract them from that goal.
- Be polite to their eyes - Fight the urge to go overboard with your attention grabbers. Animated gifs are akin to water torture and big, red, bold, underlined text is unfitting to a professional design.
- Calls to action - Tell visitors what you want them to do. Statistically speaking, your visitors are shopping your site while they are at work and they don't have time to "figure it out on their own." Tell them what to do and they will be more likely to do it.
- Show your products - If your website is a point of purchase for goods - provide a good-quality picture of the item standing alone. We strongly encourage you to include an enlarged image and an alternate view if possible. We are trying to overcome their urge to leave the site to shop around. Emulate the experience of shopping in a boutique - if they want to see the back, show the back.
- Quick loads - Optimize your images for the web and streamline your HTML code so your pages load as quickly as is possible. This is an old tip but we can't say it enough.
- Get rid of your splash page - Delete the file and purge it from your memory.
Think you have thick skin? Ask your neighbor to test your site.
Remember "think outside the box" from the 1980's? Well, get completely out of the box and show the site to someone who has zero vested interest in the project.
The higher the cost to bribe, the more likely you will receive helpful information. The more offended you are by their critique, the more assured you can be they are right.