Website design is becoming an increasingly important topic for all businesses. The online community is growing at a rapid pace each day. As more businesses establish their storefront online, competition is expanding from a local to global market. Now, almost every product is available to research and buy online. This only heightens the need for every business to have an online presence. While the Internet community is expanding, users are also evolving.
Today, the consumer is savvy and time conscious. While some consumers are looking to research products, many also want the option to buy online. As any business steps into the Internet community they need to ask themselves, “What can I do to entice consumers to buy from my website?”
It’s no secret that building a website is no simple task, but the trick is to set your business apart from the competition. The most important thing to remember is make your site usable and customer friendly. A time conscious consumer will not expend effort trying to figure out a difficult or complicated website. If you can keep your site usable, customer friendly, and aesthetically pleasing your business will see increased revenue and return on investment.
Listed below are tips to creating an effective, efficient, and profitable website design.
- Limit graphics: Glitzy graphics are great, but putting too many in a site can slow downloading time for the consumer. While you may have Cable or DSL Internet connections, many customers still use dialup. Also, putting too many graphics in the site can clutter a page and cause confusion.
- Use casual language: When designing your site, use everyday conversational language. The more relaxed the customer, the greater chance of them buying from you.
- Make paragraphs short and use bullets: No one likes to read long paragraphs of text. Break up paragraphs and long sentences with lots of bullets. Make the reader’s eye flow down the page instead of across. Also use captions to showcase important information. People’s eyes are drawn to text that is set apart from the rest.
- Change the site often: Rotating your content is very important. It not only gives customers a fresh look at your site, but a reason to come back. In addition, rotating content also helps search engine rankings.
- Place important information at the top of the page: Grab the customer’s attention by placing promotions or other key information on the top half of the page. People should never have to scroll to find or read this information.
- Have contact information visible: It should be easy for customers to contact you with questions or to order products. If they can’t find your contact information they will continue shopping but with a competitor. Put your contact information in a visible place such as the navigation bar and header.
- Don’t put too much information on a page: People want to read information about products, but don’t provide them with so much they get lost. Give the important facts, features, and benefits in a concise format.
- Navigation should be visible and simple: Make sure that any customer can easily find what they want to buy. Make section names obvious and descriptive. The more options a customer has to segment products the better. For example, you can allow people to shop by product, brand, price, etc.
- Online ordering should be simple: Give the customer an easy, fast, and secure way to order products. Make ordering screens simple and only collect necessary information.
By using these guidelines of website design you are sure to have an effective, efficient, and profitable site. It will be effective by giving customers a usable and friendly site to buy from. The site will be efficient by allowing customers to buy online, freeing you to pursue other opportunities to further your business. Lastly, it will be profitable by providing you not just a local but global customer base.