It doesn't matter if you use WordPress, Drupal, Dreamweaver, these tools won't deliver more visitors or sales to your business. While they can provide valuable online functionality to your business, unless you have the basics covered on your site, these tools are worthless.
I have reviewed hundreds of business websites for clients over the years. While it's great that small business and organizations have an online presence, it's just the beginning. If you haven't given much thought to your website lately, here is something important to think about:
Your website is the online spokesperson for your organization.
Would you allow your staff to ignore a customer or make their shopping experience difficult? Would you hire a sales person that dressed sloppy and refused to answer questions? Of course you wouldn't! But without a well thought-out and designed website, the examples above are what potential customers experience online from your business.
If your website is poorly designed and hard to navigate, you are literally driving your visitors to your competition, leaving them with the impression that you are unprofessional, unreliable and not safe to do business with.
On the other hand, if you have a totally professional looking and functioning website, your visitors have the impression that you pay close attention to every detail. You care about professionalism and you care about them.
Here are few quick design tips that address problems I frequently see on small business sites:
- Ensure you have clear directions on the navigation of your website. The menu should be uncluttered and concise so that visitors can find what they are looking for without confusion.
- Reduce the visual clutter and distractions from your website. Only use imagery and graphics that are essential to showcasing your products or that lead visitors along a path. Only use ads if they don't sidetrack visitors from the primary actions you want them to take.
- Improve your content presentation. Break up long blocks of text with bullets, subheads, product images and demo videos. If a paragraph is too long, you should split it into bite sized chunks. Basically, you don't want to hit visitors with a wall of text. And what does a wall do? It keeps people out.
- Make sure your website complies with basic standards at www.w3.org and that is cross-browser compatible. If your website looks great in Internet Explorer but renders poorly in Firefox and Chrome, you will lose a lot of prospective visitors.
- Fancy widgets that create visual animations and effects may cause problems and annoy visitors. Avoid using scripts and plugins on your site unless to provide vital business functionality. Scripts conflicts can disable certain functions and even crash some browsers. Also, some scripts are not supported across all browsers, so some visitors might miss important information without you realizing it.
Remember, your website is the face of your company online and can have an enormous impact on your business. It is important to take the time to consider solid design principles and best online practices for your site.
On the following pages are more tips and best practices for common problems I encounter with small business and nonprofit websites.
Website Usability
The look of your site is important. However, if it's hard to navigate and the content you need visors to see isn't visible and easily accessible, then your site is just wasting money. Your site won't do a good job in converting visitors to sales and won't be very useful to anyone. Your visitors won't waste time on your site and move on to your competitors.
The usability of your website will ensure it functions properly, is user-friendly, looks great and converts!
Content
It goes without saying; make sure that your content is free from spelling and grammar errors. Write your articles in MS Word or OpenOffice Writer if that helps. As mentioned earlier, break it up long text into small, easily digestible blocks that your visitor can consume quickly without much effort. You should also make sure the font size of your text is large enough to read easily so that your visitors don't have to strain their eyes to read the actual text.
If you are using a professionally designed theme or custom CSS to style your website it will do most of the work for you by setting the font size and spacing out the lines. But it's your job to make sure your articles are easy to read.
Navigation
Make it simple for visitors to find content by using focused and clear navigation. For instance, if you have hundreds of articles on your site and a certain visitor wants to find one specific article, you have to provide them with an easy way to locate it quickly through organized categories and tags.
Provide a search feature on your site. Add a sitemap. Have links to recommended article suggestions and popular posts. If you're using WordPress adding these navigation features is easy through plugins. However, no matter what website publishing platform you use, you need to plan out your navigation ahead of time.
Use a sheet of paper to draft your site's navigation and menus. Ask yourself the following questions:
- What top level categories are most useful to your visitors?
- What calls-to-action do you want to lead your visitors to?
- What other tools can you provide so visitors can find information quickly and easily?
If you get stuck you can get ideas by looking at larges sites like Amazon and EBay to see now they organize their content.
Page Load Time and Browser Compatibility
Website page load time is often overlooked by small businesses. It's important to make sure that your site pages load fast so that you don't lose visitors before they've had a chance to see what you have to offer. Fact: most internet users will leave a site within a few seconds if it doesn't load completely. There are several things that you can do to reduce the load time of your website including optimizing your images and limiting the amount of scripts you run.
It's important to keep in mind that your visitors will use a variety of web browsers when viewing your website, so you will also want to ensure that your website is cross browser compatible.
With WordPress, running too many plugins is often the source of a slow site. Plugins add extra scripts and make calls to the database, which adds to loading times. Many are poorly optimized by developers which exacerbates the problem.
There are many tools available that you can use to check the load time and compatibility of your website. They will also provide you with helpful tips and information that you can use to make sure that your visitor has a smooth and enjoyable experience on your website.
Here are a few free tools to get you started:
WordPress has a number of plugins available to help speed up page loading. But it pays to first to learn what you can do to improve performance before leaning on plugins. Often there are steps you can take in addition to using plugins.
Audit the links on your site to ensure you have no broken links. There is nothing more irritating to a visitor than clicking on broken links. You can check the links manually whenever you create a new page. However, if you have hundreds or even thousands of pages on your website then you may want to use a good link checking tool like the one at: http://validator.w3.org/checklink
Sitemaps
This section discusses the importance of including sitemaps on your website.
As the name implies a sitemap literally acts as a map of your website. Unless your website is massive with thousands of pages, a sitemap is usually a single page that contains links to each individual page on your site.
There are several formats and options to consider when it comes to creating a sitemap. Sitemaps can be created manually or with a generator like the ones found at: http://www.xml-sitemaps.com
There are different types of sitemaps you may use:
- XML sitemap that can be submitted to Google, Bing, Yahoo and other search engines to help them crawl your website better.
- An HTML sitemap specifically designed to help visitors to easily navigate on your site
- A text sitemap that displays a plain list of all your pages for use by various sites and apps.
I recommend having an XML version for the search engines, and an HTML version for your visitors. Let's look at a few reasons why a sitemap is important to the success of your site:
Optimization
Sitemaps are very important when it comes to search engine optimization. Imagine what happens when search engine robots scans your sitemap. They will follow the links on the sitemap which leads them to every single page of your site.
Navigation purposes
If your visitors browses your site and can't find what they're looking for, an HTML sitemap gives them yet another option for searching your content. You may be surprised to learn that many visitors will immediately go to your sitemap to get a sense of your content and navigate through your pages from there.
Organization and relevance
A sitemap enables you to have a complete bird's eye view of your site's hierarchical structure. As a result, you will have a nicely organized site with your content grouped by topics or themes. This is great for search engines to understand what your site is about and the related subjects you cover.
Once you have created your sitemap you'll want to submit it to the main search engines: Google, Yahoo and Bing. This will alert the search engines to send their robots to your site to catalog and index your webpages for inclusion in their directories.
Next, the most important tips in this article...
Easy Checkout
Now let's talk about the most important tip in this article: making it easy for your customers to make a purchase.
The primary reason most businesses create websites is to convince prospects to make purchase. Have you ever been to a site and wanted to make a purchase but could not find the buy button, or worse, you figure out how to buy but then nothing happens after you pay? It's shocking now many business websites make the payment process more difficult and challenging than it should be!
That's why when designing your website it's always important to keep in mind that it doesn't matter how good your content is or how good you are at convincing your prospects that they need what you have to offer, they won't make a purchase if they find the process confusing or complicated, or may ask for a refund if you leave the customer in the dark after purchasing.
Here are a few specific design techniques that you can use to ensure a smooth and painless transaction for your customers:
Clear path for ordering
As I mentioned, make sure that your prospective customers can find your order form quickly and easily. You never want to make them hunt for the buy button. You can do this in several ways, one is by writing a clear, concise paragraph to direct your prospects to your order form so that you can minimize the chances of them getting lost. You can also reduce the chances of losing prospects by putting a prominent link to your order page from every other page on your site.
Multiple payment options
Should you offer multiple payment options? Some people may feel comfortable paying via Paypal, others may only want to pay with their credit card and still others might want to send a check. The more options you offer, the better your chances of covering your prospects' desired payment method.
You also want to make your that prospective customer is as comfortable making a purchase from you as possible, so you need to do everything you can to prove that you are a reliable and credible merchant.
To do this make sure that visitors know you are using a secured order form with SSL encryption technology. Most online payment processors like PayPal and Authorize.Net offer this without any extra effort or cost on your part.
Be sure to post security badges and mention that your customer's information is safe and sound when using your site.
A solid guarantee
It is also important to offer a money back or similar type guarantee, so that people will feel confident about buying from you. Make your refund policy clear and easy to follow. This will help overcome any fears your online customers about doing business with you.
Testimonials
If you have a list of happy customers be sure to include their testimonials on your website in a prominent place, for instance, with in the sales copy and below the order button. This will help make new customers feel more confident when making a purchase from your website.
By taking the time to include these basic elements within your web design you can make your prospective customers feel confident and safe and such during the checkout process, which will help increase your profits too!
Be available to help
Always include some form of contact information on your sales page. A helpdesk or ticket system is an excellent feature to add to your site. Even customers who purchased offline can use the site for fast, convenient support, which is great customer service.
Capture Emails
Keep in mind only a percentage of your site visitors will directly lead to a sale. You should employ an email capture system on your site for those who aren't ready to buy right now, but may purchase from you later on.
The same lessons apply to asking for an email address as asking for a purchase: make it convincing and make it easy. Why should a visitor give you their email address? Give them something for free, a coupon, exclusive content, something compelling. Make it easy to opt-in; don't have them fill in a 20 question form. Don't waste their time, just get their email.
Mobile Website
I'm amazed that in 2013 there are still so many sites that are not optimized for phones and tablets. If you have a site, check your server stats or site analytics and see how many visitors are browsing your site from mobile devices. The number may surprise you. The average for many sites these days is 20%. If you don't have a mobile site, that's 20% of your online business you can wave goodbye.
At this time there are two most popular ways to go mobile for your site. The first is having a responsive design for your site, that is, a single site design that works on large and small screens.
The second methods involves having a second website designed and dedicated to handheld and tablet sized screens. Each site may have some code to detect the type of device is trying to view the site and redirect the visitor to the appropriate site if necessary.
There are arguments as to which method is better, but there is no argument for completely ignoring mobile visitors.
Creating a second website just for mobile visitors seems like a considerable undertaking, but here is a video overview for planning a mobile website that explains it doesn't have to be a lot of work: http://www.techiediy.com/planning-your-mobile-website
If you use WordPress it's easy to mobile optimize your site. Both options, responsive design or dedicated mobile site, can easily be added by installing a plugin or mobile responsive theme.
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