A Poorly Designed Website Can Kill Your Sales
It is very important to have a website, and now more than ever, it needs to reflect your business, service or product. Having a professional website can make or break a sale. Your website is usually the first or second contact with a new customer. They either find you by doing a search within a search engine like Google or Bing, or they find your business via another source and they look up your website to find out more information about your business, product, or service.
Have you ever done business with a company that offers an amazing product or service, and their website just doesn’t reflect amazingness? They could be losing new business daily! Do them a huge favour, and let them know about the experience you had with their website. They can not change something that they are not aware of.
Tips for designing a killer website that converts into positive ROI!
1. Use Great Graphics
Having poor graphics can decrease the value of your website. Make sure your graphics are high quality and are not pixelated. If you are designing your website on your own (which some small businesses do) make sure you get someone to help with the graphics that you design or choose. iStock is a great place to purchase high quality graphics.
2. Make Sure It Looks Professional
I know that lots of business owners like to save money. Realistically, we all do. Having a budget to have your website designed professionally is important. Cheaping out and getting your site built by a friend, a student, or your own kid who took a course in high-school will only cost you money and sales in the end.
I have worked with many businesses that had their first website designed by someone new in the design industry, and I have found that the level of professionalism was just not there. Having a website that isn’t functional, or looks thrown together is only going to leave a bad impression with your potential customers about your product or service.
3. Spell & Grammar Check Your Content
How many times have you gone to a website and found errors throughout the content? It doesn’t reflect well on the business. The impression that you are giving is that you don’t care to do things well. Again, have someone go over the content to correct the errors. It can be a friend, colleague, employee or spouse. It takes just one look-over to find some errors that you just didn’t see because you had been staring at it for too many hours. It is worth it in the end.
4. Easy To Navigate
Help your user find what they are looking for easily. Implement a user friendly navigational system. Have people test it out and provide feedback. Using a tracking program like crazyegg can give you some great feedback on the usefulness of your navigation.
5. Make it Easy For Them To Contact You
Your website is the perfect place to interact with your new customers. I have had many consultations with new clients that complain about their existing website not doing anything for them. When I look at the website, I find their contact information buried in their contact page. I recommend placing the business phone number dominantly in the header of the document on every page so that the user doesn’t have to search for it. Also, I always add a simple contact form to every page. Yes, I said every page! Most importantly, make sure that it is above the fold. This will definitely increase the chances of your customer contacting you. We have seen a website go from 0 calls to action to over 60 in 1 month just by adding a contact form. It’s not rocket science, it’s just smart design.
Remember, when designing your business website, it is always best to hire a professional, so make sure that you set aside a budget when planning your marketing strategy for the year. Spending your marketing budget on great sources that drive traffic to your website is a worthwhile investment, but only if your website is setup to convert the traffic once it gets there.