In a previous article we looked at the best way to boost your profits whilst building your credibility with your customers. As I read back over that article I realised that it led neatly onto website design.



?Think about it, when you are surfing the web how many sites will you visit in an hour? More importantly how many will you remember?

Pretty few I guess.

Well it's exactly the same when your potential customers come to your site, they look around and leave, a lot of the time never to return. Did you know that the average web user will only stay at a website for 10 seconds unless it grabs their attention or compels them to action??

All of which means you should look at ways to make your site more sticky, by that I mean ways to draw your users into your website make them feel comfortable and ultimately convince them to take action, like...

Join your mailing list

Make a purchase

Contact you for more information (leaving their contact details)

Remember that a website is never finished there is always room for improvement, the key is to Build Test Improve, then test, test, test and test some more.

Look and feel How a website looks will depend upon its purpose, by look I mean how it is laid out. Do you want to encourage someone to dig deeper into your site and stay or do you just want to persuade them to take action.

Even though website aims may differ there are some basic principles of site design that are universal, we will be covering these in more details in this newsletter.

Your website should display well at all screen resolutions, from 800 x 600 upwards. The Use of Liquid designs work best, this is where the web page will stretch or rearrange to fit the users browser.

Use CSS and validate mark up language to build your website.

Provide clear navigation

Scrolling, vertical is OK but horizontal really should be avoided

Address your sites accessibility, for disabled users.

Include information on your payment provider, payment types you accept, your courier, any trustworthy organizations you belong to on your home page, (basically re-assure your customers)

Provide a link to your privacy policy

Include your contact details

Resolution Although current thinking say that sites should be designed for 1024x768 with an estimated 60% of monitors being set at that resolution, we still need to consider the other resolutions from 800x600 to 1280x1024 , 17% of users still view at 800 x 600, and depending on the number of visitors you have to your website that could be a lot of people.

The best way to achieve this is to use what is called ?Liquid design? designing a website this way allows users at different resolution to have the best visual experience when on your site.

There are three main things to consider when designing;

Visibility: Is your main content / offer / product / call to action visible without scrolling. (We cover this in greater detail below in Scrolling)

Readability : Does your layout allow the content to be read easily

Aesthetics: How does your page look at different resolutions, do all the columns, content boxes, images etc line up and flow as originally intended?

CSS and mark up Thankfully designers have mostly moved away from using table and font tags and are now embracing CSS (cascading style sheets). This is a way of controlling the look and feel of your website that helps make it faster, smarter more accessible and easier to maintain and update.

CSS seems to me to embrace the way the web should be moving, uncluttered, clean and functional. CSS allows you to design beautiful, usable websites, whilst keeping page size's very small, making them load faster.

Search engines love clean valid code. Could this be a factor in the ranking algorithms? It's been hinted that it could be and it certainly seems logical.

Lots of further reading on this subject at >> http://www.w3.org/

Clear navagation It's essential that your users can navigate easily and logically around your website. Users expect certain navigation, the ?Home? button for example, or to be able to click on your company logo or banner to get back to the ?Home? page. Basically don't confuse your users by trying to be clever with your navigation, it will only cost you customers and credibility, stick to what people expect and what fits in with your business.

Scrolling When someone comes to your website, they should not have to scroll to see your ?Primary offer? your primary offer being the product or service you want to promote or an action you want them to take, sign up for your newsletter for example. If that is your goal then your sign up box should appear at the top of the page, it makes sense really, if it's hidden down at the bottom and can only be found by scrolling then you won't get as many people signing up.

Obviously there are some exceptions to this rule, if you have a catalogue site with multiple products you will only be able to display a ?best seller? or ?special offer? on the home page, if you try and put all your products up there, then you could have a lot of scrolling to do.

A long sales copy page is another exception. If you design a long copy page, simply include links to buy your product throughout the page so customers can skip straight to the action if they want to.

Address your sites accessibility for disabled users This is a big subject, and needs more than 1 small paragraph in a newsletter to cover it in any detail, it is just very important to take into consideration when designing or re-designing a website.

For more information on this subject visit >> http://www.w3.org/

Information to include on your homepage Your potential customer want to quickly establish what your site offers, how they can pay for it, how it will be delivered and what support or help is available they don't want to have to dig deeper into a site to find this information.

This simply means including some simple elements on the homepage.

The credit / debit cards you accept

Your courier

Live support if available

Contact us link

Privacy policy link

Any organizations you belong to like, Hacker safe, Verisign etc

It is worth testing different home pages over time and measuring the response and conversion rates of each then, refining like this will lead to the best number of visitors / customer conversion. Testing could involve simple changes, moving your offers, moving your shipping info from the bottom of the page to the top, making a bigger point of your ?Free shipping? policy. Like I have said before test and improve then test again.

A great resource to help you with this kind of testing is Crazy egg, check out the FREE version here >> http://www.crazyegg.com

Privacy policy In order to build credibility and ease any potential fears people may have about giving you their personal information, you should include a link to your privacy policy, ideally from each page on your website. By doing this you are letting people know that you care about this issue and that you will protect their information.

Your privacy policy should lay out exactly what information you collect and how you use it. Your privacy policy should contain contact details of an appointed member of staff dealing with customer data, and provide them with a way of viewing their data and a way for them to request that it be removed or amended. You can find details of specific legislation from your local government website, trading standards and data protection agency relevant to your own country.

Contact details Quite simple, just have a nice clear link to your contact details, which should include a phone number and a proper address, this will help in building the credibility that is crucial.

OK let's wrap this up, in this article we have looked at some factors that will help improve your website and your customer's experience of using your website. The potential to attract more people to use your site and then convert them to customers exists, whether or not this happens is ultimately down to your effort and creativity, but once you start to see the results I know that this will give you the determination to carry on increasing your sales, so good luck and let us know how you get on.

Here at www.Culturething.com we offer services ranging from consultation and advice through to website design / development and marketing strategies. So if you want to talk to us about how we can help you then get in touch right now by visiting http://www.culturething.com/contact-us