Essential Elements in Web Design for Increasing Traffic

It's important to keep web designs cutting edge to increase traffic. For eCommerce stores, the need becomes even more important. Business2Community describes the levels of innovation as increasing at a rate that might scare some businesses, but that, instead of being frightened, they should focus on the most essential elements. Here are some of the top ones you should consider including.

Mobile Website Compatibility

One of the most important elements that you must have in a website design is mobile website compatibility. Margin Media conducted a study and found that 48 percent of users will decide against using a business's service if they get to the mobile website and find it doesn't work well.

Blog

Blogs have been around since the early days of the Internet. According to "The History of Bloggin," the first blog post was published in 1997, and it soon became one of the most popular sources of web content. The Search Engine Journal states that blog posts still provide some of the best options when it comes to building up indexed web pages, as long as the content is valuable. You can get a blog started on a number of free services as well as most places where you can build a website for free.

Responsive Design

Responsive design is considered one of the must have components of an effective website, according to eMarketer. It basically means that your website will adjust to fit any screen. It's not all that is involved in making a website compatible with all mobile devices, but it's often an important part. The main benefit that it offers is the fact that the viewing experience will be the same across multiple platforms.

Fast Loading Times

A number of studies have been set up to see how long people will wait for a web page to load. Surprisingly, it doesn't seem to matter whether it's on a traditional computer or on a mobile device. eConsultancy's study found that 40 percent of people leave a website if the page takes more than three seconds in loading time. Mobile Joomla found that the number of pages that potential customers leave increase over 100 percent when it takes more than four seconds, and it goes up 150 percent if the page takes over eight seconds. Sometimes making sure that your web pages load faster will require that the design be streamlined. This is part of the reason that the modern web design has started leaning so heavily toward the minimalist influence.

Single Landing Pages for Each Product

Landing pages have not yet become dinosaurs in the Internet marketing world. While hard sell techniques still provide far lower results than other forms of advertising, certain elements of the classic hard sell campaign can still be beneficial. The landing page is one of these. According to the Marketing Sherpa, the secret is to make sure that each landing page focuses on a single goal. HubSpot's research discovered that many businesses wind up with 30+ landing pages, but that these businesses developed 7-12 times more leads than businesses with a single landing page for all their products, or even less than five such pages.

Why WordPress May Not Be The Answer

As a website developer and self-proclaimed WordPress expert (a dime-a-dozen these days), I frequently receive questions on whether or not someone should switch to WordPress from [insert other website platform]. Why are people so interested in using WordPress? It is the most popular website platform these days, but what's the problem with other platforms and how does WordPress solve these problems? After consulting for and speaking with hundreds of small businesses, non-profit organizations and website owners over the years, I've discovered that most websites suffer from the same problem.

It turns out WordPress can also have the same problem and switching over may not make a difference. Later in this article I'll reveal the answer to the most common website problem I come across on a regular basis. First, let's make sure you understand a few things about WordPress.

When you talk about WordPress sites, there are two versions:

WordPress.com - Much like Blogger, you sign up for an account and can create a new site. WordPress takes care of the hosting. However, you are limited to the features and options that they provide. There are additional features available that require an upgrade.

WordPress.org or 'Self-hosted' WordPress - You can run a version of the same software used at WordPress.com for free on your own web hosting account, giving you complete control over your site and no limitations. You can use any theme or plugin you want, or customize your site to your liking.

Though the self-hosted version is Open Source and free to use, it does have some costs since you run the software on your own web hosting account. Prices for web hosting start at as little as $3 a month, up to thousands of dollars a month depending on resource needs. Don't forget about the domain name, another $10-15 annual fee. I recommend people spend a little more than $3 a month for hosting to get higher quality service, or you can start out with cheap hosting and as the business grows upgrade later. For more on web hosting please see this free guide.

It's important to understand the difference between the two. For example, going from a platform like Blogger to WordPress.com typically may not make much of a difference. However, converting a site from Blogger to self-hosted WordPress presents a new set of features and options not available in Blogger.

Another aspect of WordPress is that with the range of theme and plugins available, just about any type of website is possible. A picture sharing site, online bookstore, video tutorial site, forum, even a new social network; these are all possible with WordPress and the right add-ons. This is one of the main reasons why it's so popular, but it still may not be a reason for you to use it.

Earlier I promised to address the most common WordPress problem people seek help with. The questions come in various forms: "Should I convert my site to WordPress?", "How can I improve the look of my WordPress site?", or "What plugins should I use?" Usually after a few questions of my own I discover the real problem: lack of traffic and conversions.

Let's talk about traffic

It seems that some people believe that WordPress can somehow bring more traffic. While there are plugins and themes that can help engage your target audience, or implement search engine best practices, there's nothing WordPress can do directly to bring more traffic to your website.

There seems to be a myth that using WordPress will automatically rank your site higher in Google, thus bringing more visitors to your site. Years ago that might have been true, or so it seemed. What really happened is that WordPress had search engine features built-in almost from the beginning. If a poorly coded site was converted to WordPress, you might see a traffic improvement overnight, especially if the competition also had poorly optimized sites.

These days most website owners have become savvy to search engine optimization and WordPress has become the most popular website platform on the web. Chances are your site's competition is either using WordPress or has a search engine optimized website. So if everyone is optimized for search why should Google put your site ahead of the competition in the search results?

There's actually much more at play when it comes to ranking high enough in Google to get a significant amount of traffic. The point is WordPress isn't special anymore when it comes to Google. However, that doesn't mean you shouldn't take advantage of it. You can get traffic from several other places: social media, paid sources, email lists, joint venture partners and more.

So traffic can be addressed without having to switch to WordPress, but are there other reasons to use WordPress? Here's a better question you should ask yourself: What is the absolute single best thing for me when a visitor lands on my website? Not sure? Here are a few examples:

• They click an advertisement


• Buy at least one product


• Sign up for my newsletter


• Contact me for more information


• Like or follow the site on social media


• Other?

What is the absolute second best thing a visitor can do? What's the third? Make your own list of desired visitor actions and prioritize it.

Now look at your list. How does WordPress support these actions? Perhaps you can optimize for these activities by selecting the right theme, or installing a few plugins. Perhaps a free WordPress.com site is all you need.

Maybe you don't require WordPress at all. Perhaps you need better copywriting or ad placement, or a few customer testimonials. None of which doesn't require changing site platforms. You may be able to reach your goals with the website you already have.

And that's the answer to second part of the fundamental problem with websites: conversions. When you get traffic to your site, it needs to convert that traffic to visitor actions you define and prioritize.

The solution to the most common problem with WordPress and sites in general is sourcing traffic and doing everything you can on your site to make that traffic convert.

Site Design and Themes

You may wonder about the importance of having beautifully designed theme or entertaining your visitors with fancy effects. This would fall under conversions; sometimes a professional design will help conversions. Conventional wisdom says beautiful web design does matter, however I've also seen many cases where a crappy looking site sells products like hotcakes.

It's much more important to come up with your list of desired visitor actions first and get those optimized on your site than to think about a new design. Think about it. If you provide fitness services, which is better for your site: a custom WordPress theme crafted by a top designer, or a video of a customer talking about how you helped her lose 27 pounds in 6 weeks, with a convenient signup button just below? The latter is much more powerful and will convert more visitors than a fancy site design. And it costs less too.

Once you have your site optimized for conversions buy some traffic from one of the many sources online and measure the results. Tweak your calls-to-action to try and improve your conversion rates. This is how you should work on your site, instead of looking at site platforms or shopping for new themes.

Of course, this article didn't explain how to optimize conversions or where to get traffic. Those are topics for future articles; the main takeaway here is to focus on the real issues your site is suffering from. When you identify the true problems you know what to look for in solutions.

Tips For Small Business Websites

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:

• 
  
  Pingdom.com


• 
  
  Google PageSpeed tool


• YSlow

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.

MaxCDN vs. Amazon CloudFront

MaxCDN and Amazon CloudFront are two popular choices in realm of CDN services. Both are affordable services, MaxCDN starting at just $39 per terabyte, while CloudFront is a little more expensive, but pay as you go with no minimum. Aside from price, the big question is which one performs better. After using both CDNs for some time on several WordPress sites, the following is my experience with each service.

In case you've never heard of a CDN, it stands for Content Delivery Network. It's basically a group of web servers located around the world that have a copy of your website and its files. When a visitor comes to your website, the CDN delivers your site files from the closest physical server to them. For example, if your website is hosted in California, a visitor from the UK has to travel halfway around the world to reach your site, which may make it seem slow and unresponsive to that visitor. However, when using a CDN, that same visitor might access a copy of your site in Europe or even in the UK, which makes your site load a lot faster and more responsive to that visitor.

[caption id="attachment_5623" align="alignright" width="223"] MaxCDN[/caption]

MaxCDN is company that specializes in CDNs. I first started using MaxCDN a few years ago, as the pricing was reasonable and the company's reputation was solid. MaxCDN was very easy to configure and install on our WordPress sites using the W3 Total Cache plugin.

After implementing MaxCDN on several sites I was extremely pleased with the results. Evaluations on speed test apps showed a major performance improvement while Google's PageSpeed grade was over 90 on each site. Plus, when I browsed my sites, the pages they just felt like they were loading a lot faster than before.

I had a very positive experience with MaxCDN but since some of my sites change ownership, I thought a pay-as-you-go bandwidth model might fit my needs better. I may go through periods of high bandwidth usage, but if a couple of my busy sites were acquired by another party, I might experience a period of low usage. I might stock up on bandwidth then suddenly not need it. Under MaxCDN's pricing model unused bandwidth could expire after a period of time.

I looked at Amazon CloudFront as an alternative. CloudFront is a CDN service from Amazon, one of many "cloud" computing service offerings billed as AWS (Amazon Web Services). Under Amazon's AWS model, I only pay for the bandwidth I use. If I need a lot of bandwidth I just get a bigger bill, less bandwidth equals smaller bill.

So I liked Amazon's pricing model and decided to set it up on some sites. Like MaxCDN, configuring CloudFront was easy. Setting up WordPress was easy too; I just had to edit a record in our hosting DNS and a couple more settings in W3 Total Cache. However, unlike MaxCDN, performance was a completely different story.

According to speed tests, there was a significant drop off in performance. For some sites, my Google PageSpeed grade really fell off, dropping down to the 60s. According to Google, the reason for the low grade was slow downloads from our CDN hosted files! I found the results to be very strange; I rechecked the configuration, made sure all Edge locations were selected.

Test results were inconsistent; sometimes I saw good grades, other times not. Whatever the explanation, if these are maintenance issues or traffic spikes at some of Amazon's datacenters, I'm just not comfortable with the irregularities. The reason you use a CDN is for performance, this was like buying high octane fuel but never knowing when it was going to kick in. Another than the inconsistencies, when scores were good they were not as high as with MaxCDN.

That's why I'm going exclusively with MaxCDN. I never had any issues with performance. If I end up buying more bandwidth than I need, then so be it. The peace of mind is worth it. Occasionally they run specials so I can get great deals on bandwidth to help with expenses. In fact, they are running one right now: 25% off.

There's also the advantage of customer service. I never had to call MaxCDN support in the past, but it's there if I need it. With Amazon web services, you're pretty much on your own.

Again, this was my experience running over a dozen WordPress websites with these two CDN services. My testing was not scientific, for me the stakes (cost of switching CDNs) were too low to justify spending a lot of time on testing. I tested enough times on each site to reach a point where I felt I needed to make a change.

Switching from CloudFront to MaxCDN was dead simple. Since I already had everything setup, I only had to change a few settings. I still have a few sites to switch over; I'll document the steps I take and post them as a follow up to this article.