by Francois Muscat | Feb 9, 2010 | Website Development
Most web surfers today is very sceptical. To make your website trustworthy and to build credibility, it is absolutely vital to take your website seriously as the web is an impersonal medium.
If your website does not appear professional or credible, potential buyers will leave in seconds. There’s millions of websites. What will make users stay on your website?
Your website is the building blocks for establishing yourself online. Most of the time, people will be looking at your online profile before conducting any business with you. This is human nature. People want to know who they are dealing with. Why not present them with a solution to problems they might be having?
Find below a couple of tips to build trust with your website
Clean Design
Start your website with a clean design. A clean website design with useful information will make your visitors interested. Always avoid confusing your visitors. The navigation, design and information should be clear and to the point. Understand what your visitors are looking for and help them to accomplish their goals.
Professional Development
If you have a big website with allot of functionality, keep the website development professional. Always guide your visitors on logical steps on what to do next. Make sure everything works 100%.
Quality Content
Always keep your content unique and informative. The images and the words you use will the reflect the quality that you provide. The key is to show what great value your service or product is.
Assure your clients
Always assure your clients that your company is trustworthy. You can do this by including a privacy policy, guarantee or a return policy on your website. Join trusted organizations and place their logos on your website. You can also clearly show your address and phone number.
Testimonials
People will trust what other people are saying about you and your services. Positive customers that are specific are the most powerful. Include some of these testimonials on your website to increase your credibility.
A website is a powerful business tool if utilized correctly. It is your image on the web. Leave a comment below if you want more information on how to build trust with your website.
by Francois Muscat | Feb 5, 2010 | Website Development
Reports in the past has shown that 80-90% of all new business websites and blogs will fail to yield successful results. What is even more frightening is that most of these websites could succeed if planned and executed correctly. Why do these new websites fail? What goes wrong?
Find below a couple of reasons some new websites fail.
Design over strategy
Companies often spend most of their time planning how their website design will look. They don’t have a clue who their targeted audience will be or planned their messaging or a “call to action”. A good website design always starts with a strategy. Focus first on creating your stream of leads, online sales or quotation requests.
No Traffic plan
To think that you can only build your website and then visitors will flock to it is not true. It doesn’t work for business websites. Decide and plan your traffic sources such as organic searches, referral traffic or pay per click before you start with the design of your site. Organic Search Engine Optimization is much more effective when designed into a website from the start.
It’s really not about you
Usually the websites that brags about how great you are will quickly turn off visitors. People are searching for solutions to their problems. By boasting your achievements won’t solve your visitors problems. Don’t tell them about your new car, rather how to fix theirs. Organize your website so that the answers are easily found. Avoid industry jargon and use plain english.
Flashy graphics
Most Flash only websites looks cool but they are usually slow loading and search engines can’t index their content. It is ok to use Flash elements in your website for videos, banners, etc mixed with text content. Keep your website simple and focus on solving a problem for your visitor. After all “content is king”.
Low cost design
Don’t hire your best friend to design and develop your business website. They might receive some great experience from it but you can sacrifice your business image and the ability to drive targeted traffic to your website. Hire a professional development firm that is experienced in both development and design and website traffic strategies.
Your website is a powerful business tool if utilized correctly. Don’t let your website fail.
by Marelise da Silva | Nov 30, 2009 | Website Development
A successful website does two things. Firstly, they attract a regular flow of visitors that are interested in what your services or products are. Second, they are usually designed to get visitors to take a action. This could either be to convert them into buyers or at least get them started into your conversion process.
The “call to action” could either be to build an email list, quotation requests or signing up for a webinar.
There is a kind of magic to design and develop a website to get your visitors to take action. Find below a couple of tips to help you with your website to convert visitors into customers.
Memorable
Create a design for your website that will be memorable and that stands out from the crowd. You don’t have to design the next greatest “artwork”. It only means that you must have a style that your visitors will like and remember. The design should be appropriate to your industry.
Information
People are searching the internet for answers to their questions. They are looking for information to a problem they might have. Make it quick and easy for them to find the information that they are seeking. Have a clear writing style, navigation and formatting.
Sales funnel
Guide your visitors on the steps they should do next. Grab their attention, build their trust and then get them to take an action (call to action). Your best selling sequence should be built into your website.
Prevent surprises
Always give the right information to your visitors before you take them through the call to action. A common mistake in e-commerce websites is that they are not revealing the shipping costs until the payment step.
Communicate
If there is anything on your website that can take time to complete, let your visitors know how far they have gone. This could be done by breaking the steps up and showing a progress bar. This can include a e-commerce checkout, survey or even a download file.
Trust
People are cautious to buy online. Always make it easy for them to contact you by providing your address and phone number on your website. Post your shipping procedure, privacy and refund policy so that your visitors can read them.
Improve
Be prepared to make changes to your website based on actual experience. Measure the bounce rate of your website. The bounce rate is the number of visitors that visits a particular page and then leave without going on to the other pages. These are then divided by the total of visitors to the page.
Other key measurements includes visitor counts, traffic sources and conversion rates.
Leave a comment below if you require more information to design a website to convert your visitors into customers.
by Marelise da Silva | Sep 28, 2009 | Website Development
To have a normal sitemap on your blog and website is an easy way for your visitors to jump to any page on your site. It can make your navigation easy if you have a big site with lots of pages. Usually these sitemaps are created by normal HTML and they are know as HTML Sitemaps.
Even though this is a easy way to jump to any page in your website, is it written in clear well formatted HTML so that search engines can find your content easily? This is where XML Sitemaps can come in handy.
Take from Wikipedia:
A site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for web design, or a web page that lists the pages on a web site, typically organized in hierarchical fashion. This helps visitors and search engine bots find pages on the site.
The XML Sitemap was first introduced in 2005 by Google and adopted in late 2009 by both MSN search and YAHOO. Later Ask.com also joined in so that now all the major search engines supports this Sitemap protocol. XML Sitemaps is a important element in achieving SEO results.
XML Sitemaps is a easy for webmasters to inform search engines about all the pages on their website that’s available for crawling and indexing. On the XML Sitemap it lists all the pages of the website along with when it was last updated and how often the content changes.
The XML Sitemaps protocol is a standard that makes it easier to create a sitemap that can be parsed by all the major search engines. Web crawlers usually discover pages from links within the site and from other sites. Sitemaps supplement this data to allow crawlers that support sitemaps to pick up all URLs in the sitemap
Depending on how your website is structured and if the navigation is easy, it can be easier for search engines to find all of your pages and content with a XML Sitemap.
Contact us if you require additional information regarding the creation of a XML Sitemap file or leave your comment below.
