Small businesses often lack the in house expertise to build a compelling website. Many times the owner or a friend of the owner has some limited HTML experience and tries his/her hand at standing up the site. Some other times they hire a low cost shop to do it for them. Many times the ROI suffers.
What we see out there is a lot of sites that look so ... early 2000.
They do not use modern layouts.
They are neither mobile ready nor SEO friendly.
They are hard to update and do not have a content management system.
On the e-commerce sites we see quite a few that display product in a confusing manner, implement cumbersome navigation and insecure ordering processes.
There are still a lot of websites that do not use the right copy, have weak calls to action, do not implement social media, do not have a blog.
Here are a few tips on how to improve your website and increase conversions.
1. Use a well known platform
Use a platform like WordPress or Joomla! These platforms have many advantages such as the availability of well pre designed layouts and plug-ins, content management readiness, mobile readiness, SEO etc.
2. Design right
Try & implement a clean friendly easy to use design and layout. Buttons have to be visible, of good size and the sequence of fields/forms to fill out before placing an order has to be as straight forward and as short as possible.
For better performance optimize the size of your graphics and do not use flash. When embedding videos always run them off their hosted lication (such as YouTube).
3. Code right
Code clean, fast optimized. Avoid long procedural statements, repeated routines and long loops. Avoid over embedding. Write standard. Catch and treat as many exceptions as you can think of.
4. Use clear calls to action
"Call now!" or "E-mail now!" are under used and under estimated statements. They are important steps in converting a website visitor into a paying customer and should always be there.
5. Involve your audience
Besides the strong calls to action you need to make efforts to involve your audience. Once the people landed on your website, try to create a unique experience for then and start to involve them in your concept.
Videos for example are a great way of increasing customer invilvement. Make videos that tell your story. Have personnel pitch in short 1 minute videos. And always call to action during videos as well: a call to action from a video is stronger than a written call to action because it's much more personal.
Stick around and we will dive into more details in an upcoming series of blogs.
Make it a great day!
Adrian Corbuleanu
Miami Beach, FL
http://wittywebnow.com
Witty Web Solutions (http://wittywebnow.com) is a Miami Beach based software development company. Our code is lean, small foot print, easy to read, reliable and fast. We have excellent tech support. We save development costs by implementing agile project management techniques.
