The E-Commerce Blog

You’ve tested your website, you’ve visited it a few times, you’ve gotten some feedback on it, and you have a bit of data about your visitors.

You might want to make some changes. Here are the top ten issues in website design and usability.

Think about these things in relation to your website and consider what you might want to do to perfect your site.

1. The First Glance

In general, people look at the top left corner of your website first. You should have your essential information there: what your offerings are and how

your potential customers can get it. Some visitors are at your site only long enough to confirm that you sell what they want, and some are ready to buy. All

visitors need to be able to tell what you do right away. Don’t hide behind a splash page or make people wait while something loads – many won’t take
the time.

2. Navigation

When your customers want and need more information, they’ll stay and look for it. Make sure they can find it easily. Put your navigation in the usual

places, and make it very obvious what your visitors need to click in order to find each section. Don’t have more than 5-7 choices in your main
navigation and keep it consistent on every page. Let your creativity and uniqueness show in some other way – follow the rules when it comes to

navigation.

3. Contact Information

Can customers (and search engines) find you when they need you? Your contact information must be clear and accurate. It must also be easy to find.

Visitors will visit your website several times before they choose to go for your services or purchase. Don’t make it hard for them to contact you when

they’re ready.

4. Call To Action

What do you want your visitors to do? It should be easy to find out how to complete an order through your website or get more information. Regardless of

the content of the page make sure that you include a clear call to action. Make it easy for visitors to purchase or request information from
you. Just be sure to make it very clear.

5. Above the Fold Focus

Many visitors won’t scroll; most won’t scroll unless you have already convinced them that it’s worth their while to
do so. Make sure important aspects are above fold. The unimportant things – why are they on your page? This is especially important on the home page.

Visitors who’ve reached your FAQs page or your blog are probably interested enough to spend some time reading.

6. Inviting Content

To develop relationships with your clients, you need to have them visit more than once. In fact, most people won’t commit themselves the first time they

come to your website. You need to offer them something of value so they’ll return. Do you have a blog, or frequently-updated featured products?
Have you got any useful information that you could offer your customers?

7. Well-Organized Pages

Don’t make your visitors search. Always ensure that your page layout is clear, concise and gives the visitor exactly what they want without having to

search for it. Try to put yourself in your customer’s position and use what you learn from testing. Decide what you want to say and plan its
organization before you write, so you can be sure to have coherent paragraphs.

8. Visual Appeal

While the content on your page is the most important thing, an attractive page will be more enjoyable and appealing for
visitors. Choose colours that work well together, leave some open space so it’s not too busy, and make sure you have everything lined up nicely. Even if you

have not got artistic skills you can make a good impression – and you should.

9. Sincerity and Trustworthiness

The internet is all about trust. If you can ensure that your website is trustworthy, people will be more likely to complete an order. What’s more, the

search engines also base your rankings on how trustworthy they think your page is. Don’t undermine your future success by trying to trick the search engines

or mislead your visitors.

10. A Polished Finish

Do your links work? Make sure you check your grammar, spelling and layout are correct? Is all the information up to date and accurate? Your visitors would

prefer to shop in a well kept and clean shop in the high street. They would prefer to purchase in a clean and well kept website too. They’ll have less faith

in you if you have errors on your website.

Is your website perfect? Maybe not. We’ll be providing more information on all of these points as we go along, and your site will become better and better

as you follow our suggestions and learn more.

About the author
Get Instant Access to our Free Guide to Proven Techniques
on How to Succeed Online. http://www.pickaweb.co.uk/ebook-download.htm

Building a great landing page should be on top of your priority list if you want your website visitors transformed into customers.

While a great looking website can grab the attention of your visitors, a strong landing page will keep them involved and get them to buy your products/services.

Wikipedia defines a landing page as:

The page that appears when a potential customer clicks on an advertisement or a search-engine result link. The page will usually display content that is a logical extension of the advertisement or link, and that is optimized to feature specific keywords or phrases for indexing by search engines.

Wikipedia’s definition sums it up nicely but there is certainly more to a great landing page then relevant and keyword rich content. Here are 10 things that you should be looking at when optimizing a landing page:

- Relevant Content

A landing page’s content should be directly related to organic search results, PPC campaign, anchor text in inbound links and any other targeted inbound advertising, online and offline. If people don’t get what they expect, they will be more likely to leave.

- Multiple Landing Pages

A landing page shouldn’t necessarily be your homepage. In many instances a homepage is a good landing page. However, for more targeted traffic and better results, you want a landing page to be focused on a specific offer and specific call for action. To accomplish this, a given website should have multiple landing pages. Create some deep link landing pages that will focus on a specific offer and your conversion rate will be higher.

- Focus on Functionality

More and more visitors seem to judge the professionalism and credibility of a site by its design. To satisfy this, many website owners concentrate on the design aspect instead of focusing on its functionality. A well-designed landing page is essentially worthless if the prospect can’t accomplish anything. While I wouldn’t suggest skimping on the design, it shouldn’t be your priority. Focus on the exact steps you want your visitor to take and design a page with that in mind.

- Call To Action

You got visitors to your landing page, now direct them to take action. Make it clear and highly noticeable without overwhelming your audience. Whether it’s a sign-up form or a “buy now” button, make it the focus of your page.

- Send a Clear Message

Keep your landing page clean and clutter free so your visitors stay focused on your message. Emphasize the biggest reasons that they should carry out the applicable call to action with larger text, contrasting colors, images. Make it easier for them to scan the content by using lists and getting right to the point.

- Offer Incentive

Bribing your visitors with freebies and samples is a proven method of enticing them to sign up. Offer more than your competition but don’t sell yourself short either. Provide a list of reasons why your offer is better and what exactly the visitor can expect. Provide references and testimonials. 

- Make Visitors Stay

Avoid sending your visitors to another page unless it is absolutely necessary. That includes any internal navigation as well as external banners. If you remove all distractions and limit navigation options, you stand a better chance of keeping your visitors around.

- Simple is Better

Make it easy for your visitors to complete the action you want them to. Less confusion and decision making for your visitor means better conversions rate for your landing page. Don’t offer multiple choices and throw in optional extras. Focus on the offer the page was created for.

- Power of Freebies

Everyone likes free offers. They are hard to resist and can be a powerful conversion tool. Whether a call to action is free or something free is received as a result of carrying out a call to action, it certainly doesn’t hurt. If your competition charges for something and you offer it for free, you’ll win the
customer. Remember, just because you make a free offer doesn’t mean that it shouldn’t be quality.

- Testing

In a recent post “How to Turn Website Visitors into Buyers”, I’ve stressed how important testing is in finding out what your visitors like. Testing various text, call to action forms, layouts will give you a true idea what produces the best results as far as conversion.

Using a tool like Google’s Website Optimizer you can easily monitor the conversion rate, bounce rate, and tons of other useful metrics found in most modern day web analytics apps. Using these metrics you can easily figure out which version will be your optimal page, one that maximizes the results.

Creating a successful and effective landing page takes a lot of work but should be the focus for anyone involved with a website. Whether you are a website owner, web designer, web developer or a web marketing specialist you must be aware of the components that comprise a solid landing page. After all this can mean a website’s success or failure.

About the Author
Joanna Colek is the owner of Joanna Ciolek Web Design Studio, based in North Denver, Colorado. She offers affordable, custom and effective web design services to small business owners.

So you want to get free advertising, traffic and back links from the multitude of social networks out there but you don’t know which to use and what to do. Hopefully today you’ll learn a few useful tips to boost your profile and maximize the buzz of social networks.

Where To Start?

Digg is hard to use unless you’ve been around a while. It’s top users really flex their collective muscle when it comes to dominating the front page. That doesn’t mean you shouldn’t add your articles – Not at all – Adding your articles to Digg, making tons off friends and testing the water is well worth it. Chances are you WON’T make the front page, but if you do……traffic jackpot.

Propeller is fast to use, which means you can get in and out with much fuss, so I highly recommend adding your link there.

Stumble Upon is nowhere near as good as it was and you have to stumble a ton of site to get and credibility. You should add your profile and your blog/site, but don’t expect the promise you may hear.

Reddit is pretty good and low effort so definitely give it a try.

Delicious is a little bit of a pain – The tool bar you have to download is annoying and the whole submission process could be handled better, but if your site gets buzz from delicious then it will all be worth the fuss.

The key to the major sites is to make friends, comment on articles and be positive. You will get reciprocal votes, as long as you appear genuine and give someone a value of sorts.

Twitter – Here is a little trick for twitter to get an extra “dofollow” link. You get to add your website or blog, but if you stick your site url in your bio entry, you’ll get an extra “dofollow” link. A nicve little bonus.

Using Myspace and Facebook – These two can be useful as you just upload your links on your profile and add friends galore. People who follow you on Social Networks have a greater trust for you and therefore your site or blog, making preselling easier. The slot machine chat room on Facebook is a great way to find new friends to add.

Pligg Sites

These mini “Digg” sites are worth a mention as they when used properly , help you build up some nice little traffic. Pligg sites are Digg clones and as such are easy to submit and vote on. They a much smaller so they won’t get you anywhere near as much traffic, but because they are small they are easier to dominate and make the front page.

Just like the big social bookmarking networks, Pligg sites work by you submitting a link and then others vote on it. You can add friends and get more votes, which is always a good strategy.

The best Pligg based sites are Topstumbles, DropJack and StuffDaily.

Using these can help get you the extra traffic boost you want to take your “numbers” to the next level.

About the Author
Andrew Templar studies social marketing sites for anomalies and loopholes. Being in the “know” is extremely useful for boosting the marketability of a website.