Improve Your Website's Conversion Rates With These 6 Design Tips

An appealing website design is important, but you can’t lose sight of what your website is really for: to convert traffic into lead-form submissions, phone calls, physical-location visits, contact-form submissions and sales. Without these actions, your business will not generate revenue. Naturally, the more conversions your website produces, the more revenue your business is going to produce.

I recently sat down for a morning cup of coffee with a friend that wanted me to audit his company’s website. Its conversion numbers were extremely low and my friend was willing to make any necessary changes to improve those numbers. Here are six takeaways from our conversation that you can implement to improve your conversion rates.

How Web Site Usability and Conversions Are Different: Comparison

The terms "usability" and "conversions" are often used loosely or in combination with each other. Neither is very descriptive and both are open to interpretation. In truth, they are two separate web design practices, with different goals. When brought together for a site design, the potential for web site success is explosive.

The Biggest Difference

Web site usability is the art of designing web pages that are easy to use. Web accessibility is design so that everybody can use the site. The goal of conversions design is creating web pages that people will want to use. Conversions, which are nothing more than helping visitors complete a task, depend on usability, accessibility and knowing exactly what your customers need and want. Persuasive design, emotional design, and human factors design create opportunities to conversions.

The more site owners and their staffs know about their target visitors, the better their conversions analytics data will look. Of course there are other factors that play a role, such as having a solid online business plan, a clear set of requirements, site goals such as generating revenue, getting subscriptions or getting people to use your Internet application and your marketing strategy. Let's say you have all that and someone has tossed you the usability and conversions balls to play with but you're not sure how they're different or why they're lumped together. 

The Walmart Guide to Increasing the Average Time Spent on Site

I have a love/hate relationship with Walmart (Sorry to disappoint – I’m still a classy gal, but I never pay more than I have to for everyday household items) – I love getting a decent price on consumables, but I hate the fact that I can never just run in and out of that store.

I’ve even tried to time myself, but if I ever have to go towards the back of the store, I can never get out of that store in a decent amount of time – even when it’s supposed to be an in and out job.

It’s as if I step in to a time-warp where I lose all sense of time.  An hour of browsing can feel as if it were only 10 minutes.  Even waiting in line is fun with all the cool gadgets, lotions, lipglosses, goodies and celebrity magazines to keep you entertained.

10 Things Your Customers Won’t Tell You About Your Website

There are numerous ways that you can gauge how successful your website is. You can see how many visitors you get over a given time period and how long each visitor stays on your site each time they visit. You can check your site’s speed and functionality. You can get relatives, friends, and peers to tell you how wonderful it is.

Website optimization trends, insights and tactics for boosting conversion

When it comes to a retailer’s website, the tinkering never stops. Whatever the incremental improvement—move this button, return these results in this region, recommend this, not that—it’s tested, measured, refined and tested again, all in an endless pursuit to make conversion rates climb higher and higher and make the customer experience better and better.

Time-Saving Ideas That Can Benefit My Website Without Hiring a Personal Assistant?

As an entrepreneur, you’re always looking for ways to save time and money. Keeping your website on the cutting edge and functioning optimally for your business is a constant concern. While hiring a webmaster or a personal assistant can be a time saver, you’ll have to decide if that position is worth adding a salary to your business expenses.

With all of the developments in technology these days, there are ways to maximize the effectiveness of your website without having to hire a personal assistant.

8 Common Mistakes Made When Organizing your Website Menu

What is the one thing that gets overlooked in nearly 99% of the websites we look at in our comprehensive website evaluation?  The website menu.

Your website menu is just as important as the content that it is trying to organize.

While there’s no one right way to do a menu, here are 8 common mistakes made when organizing your menu.  Use this list as a quick checkup on your existing menu or a guide when planning a new menu/site design.

5 Tips to Manage & Reduce Web Design Costs

It is important to have a strong web presence to keep ahead of the competition. However, some of the costs associated with website design are prohibitive. Here are five ways to help lower costs and keep them down:

1. Use freelancers: Freelancers will often produce quality work for less money than a design firm will charge. Why? Because they need to undercut the competition to compete. Whether you need a writer, a graphic artist, back-end programmer or concept artist, a good web design freelancer can do better work for half the cost.  Elance.com has some great freelancers that you can work with, and also offers an escrow system so that your funds are safe.

How To Evaluate A Website To Maximize Your Potential

One of the most important things you can do as a blogger is learning how to evaluate a website to maximize it’s potential. Evaluating your progress is something that every business needs to be able to do, yet many of the people that I see on a regular basis never do. As a blogger, you also need to be able to measure that evaluation. Sadly, many bloggers don’t have any way to measure where they stand because they haven’t clearly defined any goals for their blog.

Start Setting Goals For Everything

how to evaluate a websiteBlogging without any goals is kind of like jumping in the car to go on a roadtrip without a destination or even a roadmap. You would get lost pretty quickly if you just jumped in the car and took off after browsing some blogs on traveling, yet this is how most people go off into running a blog.

How Website Performance Affects Online Shopping Behavior

We can talk all day about website usability, navigation, marketing and so fourth. What we don’t really look at too often is how our website performs which really can make or break the visit for the consumer.

Let’s look at some key statistics regarding how website performance affects shopping behavior:

                                 Source: KISS METRICS

6 Clues That Show Your Website Has Been Penalized

For many months now, Google has been rolling out algorithm updates known as “Panda” and “Penguin”.
Hence, many websites have suffered, even those considered authorities on the web. From their high perch in search results, some have fallen to the bottom. On the other hand, a few disappeared entirely.

But not only Google has been penalizing several sites, other leading search engines such as Bing and Yahoo have also been wiping off some portals from their indexes.

Now, this has many owners or developers wondering if SEO still works or if they have even applied the right strategies at all. In fact, a query on Google that starts with “SEO is…” produces the following results (see the next image).

8 Simple Tips to Reduce and Optimize Website Loading Time

Waiting is always irritating and everyone hates to wait. This is also true for websites and blogs, if your website takes too much time to load then it starts losing its visitors and customers. As a website owner it should be your aim to not only make your website user friendly but also make it server friendly. We personally suggest you to focus on reducing loading time of your website. If your website loads fast then it will also be loved by those who have slower internet connections and Search engine algorithms also consider your site’s load time. Let’s have a look on how we can reduce and optimize website loading time.

Is Your Hotel Website Ready for Summer?

With summer right around the corner and industry indexes projecting travel on the rise in the coming months, hoteliers need to have their websites looking and functioning their best in order to attract travelers and turn lookers into bookers. According to a May 2012 article titled: Forecast Optimistic For Upcoming Summer Travel, 92 percent of Americans will take a vacation this summer. To help hoteliers better plan their seasonal online marketing strategies, Lodging Interactive has developed a new Hotel Website Solutions program that delivers online marketing service and support at a low, month-to-month fee with all upfront costs removed.

Οι κυριότερες αιτίες για τη χαμηλή κατάταξη μιας ιστοσελίδας στη μηχανή αναζήτησης Google

Έχοντας μια ιστοσελίδα με ποιοτικό περιεχόμενο και νομίζοντας ότι κάνετε τα πάντα σωστά ώστε να ωθήσετε τη Google να σας ανεβάσει στην κορυφή των αποτελεσμάτων της μηχανής αναζήτησης, τελικά παρατηρείται ότι παρά τις προσπάθειες η ιστοσελίδα σας δεν κατατάσσεται σε υψηλές θέσεις.

Παρακάτω παρατίθενται μια λίστα από κοινές παρατυπίες που μπορεί να κρατήσουν ακόμη και τις καλύτερες ιστοσελίδες μακριά από τις κορυφαίες θέσεις των αποτελεσμάτων αναζήτησης.

Αιτίες χαμηλής κατάταξης ιστοσελίδας

4 reasons you need a mobile website

How does your site look on a smartphone?
Many of you may be thinking, My website displays fine in mobile browsers, even if it is a little small.
What’s the big deal?
Just having a mini version of your existing website is not going to cut it. You need a mobile version of your website that addresses all of the following issues:

Load time

1.A website designed for mobile will load in around four or five seconds, while a traditional website can take as long as 40 seconds to load on a mobile device. Not only will this lead to much frustration for your site visitors, but it will also keep your site from placing well in mobile directories.

12 Annoying Things About Your Website That Drive People Away

How many times have you visited a website and ended up sorely disappointed? Or worse, annoyed as all get out? For me, the answer is an easy one: a lot!

So, I put together a list of the 12 things that annoy me the most about websites. Maybe you’ll agree; maybe you won’t.
Let’s see…
12. Music
Music blares the minute I visit your site. That is unexpected, disruptive, and downright rude, from a customer experience standpoint. And, in case you weren’t sure, it ticks me (and most people) off more than just about anything. Wake up and smell the coffee! That is so 2001. Frankly, it wasn’t cool even back then—but today, music on your website can mean the kiss of death.

Most Websites/Blogs Have A Natural Traffic Limit

Since I started building my first websites back in 2005 I probably owned at least twenty different ones, ranging from blogs like this one to niche websites and service-oriented sites. One pattern I noticed over these years is that most websites have a natural traffic limit.
By natural traffic limit I mean an amount of traffic (e.g., 30,000 monthly uniques, 200,000 monthly uniques or 3 million monthly uniques, depending on the site in question) that the website will attract once it’s fully developed and established. The graph below (sorry for my design skills!) illustrates the points:

As you can see, most websites start slow, then they go through a rapid growth phase, and then they reach the natural limit. Sure, they might still keep growing after reaching the limit, but that growth will be minimal in comparison to the previous growth period.

How Much Information Is Too Much?

Be Safe Online
What should you share with the public and what should you keep off your personal Web site to be safe online? If you want to stay safe online maybe you should have some things on password protected pages so that only people you want to see it can see it.
Is there a reason you put your full name, address and maybe even your phone number on your personal Web site? Why do you post pictures of your children? Do you talk about personal, very personal things, that happen in your life and leave it out there for all to read? These are not things that help you be safe online.

Improve Calls To Action On Your Website in 4 Simple Tips

Do you get a lot of traffic to your site, but have a low percentage of those visitors actually convert? You may be confusing your users; they may not know how to get to the next step, or they may not even realize there is a next step on your site. How can you successfully get users to the end of your conversion funnel? With calls to action, of course! Calls to action tell the user where they need to go, or what they need to do next. Below are four things you can do to improve your calls to action: