But sadly 'looking great' doesn't cut it. The primary objective of good website design for the vast majority of products and services is to ACHIEVE MORE SALES. Lets be real clear on this again - it is not about how wonderful your site looks or even how many visitors look at your website, what really counts is HOW MANY ACTUALLY END UP BUYING? How many part with their own hard earned money to purchase the product or service you're marketing because they can see the value in what it is you're offering.



So the real judge on how good a website is, is in my view on how many sales it achieves relevant to the amount of visitors it gets. 1,000 people visiting your website but with only 3 buying suggests (strongly)that you need to seriously look at your website design. 300 visitors with 20 buying means you're getting your website design much closer to being right.

==> Thought 1. Think like your visitors. It's often too easy to write copy; design headlines; use colours and images all because you think that's what your potential customer will want to read/see. Try and look at it differently - if you were the visitor to your site don't think 'what would I want to read/see' but think more 'what would I need to read/see to encourage me to buy!'. I appreciate it's a subtle difference but it's a very key difference in perspective and it will make the world of difference to your website conversions.

==> Thought 2. Always come from the premis that you can always get 'more business' from your website by being prepared to constantly tune key elements - there is no such thing as a completed website. Every website, no matter how good it is at converting visitors to sales, can still be improved to increase sales. Set aside a little time each week, with each website you build and design, to review, tweek, test, review again, tweek and test again, and do this over and over to keep improving the results. An extra 0.5% increase here and there can have a profound impact on your bank balance.

==> Thought 3. Study your competitors and think "how can I build a better mousetrap?".

If you are marketing products or services in which you have competitors doing something similar, look at what they're doing to identify what they're doing right AND what they're doing wrong! - both from which you can learn. One of the best ways to find out what's 'right' and 'wrong' with a competitor's website is to ask some friends or work colleagues to be 'mystery shoppers' and look over the competitor's website as if they were interested in buying something from it. Ask them to note down what they like and don't like about it; simply ask them to write down what would have enthused them to buy and what were the key things that put them off. Because your 'mystery shoppers' (friends) are not so close to internet marketing as you, allows the feed back to be much more relevant.

Learning from what your competitors are doing right, look at those elements to see if you can improve on those things ...and for all the bits they're not doing right, ensure you don't do those things. One exception to this is this... the parts on a competitor's website that you feel are wrong, may be wrong only because of something small and with some tweeking and tuning by you, it could be that you could turn that bit that's wrong into to a positive that you could then include on your site ...and you are therefore simply building a "better" mousetrap.

These were 3 quick thoughts I thought I'd share with you to help you get focused on creating website design that SELLS products and services ...and doesn't just 'look good'.

Success is within you, my job is simply to help you achieve it. - Steve.