?Is the design consistent? All your pages should follow some basic pattern or format and look similar.
Planning
Do your home work before you begin to write and design your web site.
?Do you have a clear goal?
?Is your web site unique? (USP)
?Did you define your ideal customer?
Web Site Development
?Are you targeting your prospective buyers with your web site's content, message, and design?
Sales Process/Ordering Process/e-Commerce
?Is it easy to contact you?
?Do you provide contact information on every page or do you have a link to a contact page?
?Are you providing an 800 number, local number, mailing address, and email?
?Is it easy to buy from you? Do you provide several easy ordering options? (online, fax, mail, phone, 800 order number). Do you provide several payment options? (credit cards, PayPal, Storm Pay, cashier's check, money order)
?Are you providing a secure online order form?
?Is your order form easy to find?
?Do you provide risk reversal with a money-back guarantee?
Design Elements
?Does your web site look professional? Does it portray a powerful, professional image?
?Is your web site user-friendly? (logical navigation, speed, easy-to-read)
?Do your web pages load fast?
?Are your pages easy to read? (layout, colors, white space)
?Is your site interactive? Can visitors contact you through email forms, feedback forms, and guestbooks? Are you communicating with your visitors through newsletters?
?Do all graphics and images show up?
?Are your forms working? Did you check every part of your forms?
?Did you maintain a consistent look and feel? Are the layout, typefaces, colors, and navigation consistent in all your pages?
?Did you use white space, color, and formatting to control the look of your documents?
?Are pages designed for your target audience? Do they fit your audience's monitor?
?Did you test and optimize all pages wimth popular browsers, platforms, computers, screen resolutions, and settings?
Navigation
?Can visitors and potential buyers easily find what they're looking for?
?Do you have a link to your home page, contact page, and order form on every page?
?Are all links working?
Final checklist before putting pages on the Web
?Did you verify spelling and grammar?
?Is the content written at your audience's reading level?
?Did you use a writing style and vocabulary your audience understands?
?Did you verify contact information?
?Did you verify that all graphics show up?
?Did you verify that all forms are working?
?Did you view your pages with popular browsers, platforms (PC and Mac), screen resolutions, and settings?
Marketing
?Are you capturing your visitors' email?
?Are you providing a free newsletter, report, consultation, or other offer?
?Are you building email lists?
?Are you staying in touch with your potential buyers through an ezine, newsletter, announcements, and special offers?
?Are you marketing your site consistently?
?Are you submitting your web site to search engines every four to six weeks?
?Are you tracking your traffic?
?Are you updating your site regularly?
Think like the ideal customer. Your Web site will be successful only if you provide what your visitors and buyers need.
My Own Web Site
Its very noteworthy to mention that you shouldn't just don’t focus on the home page, keywords and titles of your website when considering the SEO side of things for more viewers. There are reasons for everything that is done a certain way, which also happens to include the way you market your website to the online public.
The first step to sales when customers visit your site to see the products they are looking for is to give them a reason to stay at the site. Of course, search engine optimization and better rankings are not necessarily going to keep your customer on your site or make them want to buy what it is that your selling. You will want to come up with something very interesting that will somehow be interesting or entertaining for the online surfer. The customer having visited your site, now ensures that he gets interested in your products or services and stays around.
Motivate him to buy the product by providing clear and unambiguous information. Thus if you happen to sell more than one product or service, provide all necessary information about this, maybe by keeping the information on a different page. By providing suitable and easily visible links, the customer can navigate to these pages and get the details. It is always a great idea to easily provide what it is the customer is looking for when they are at your site.
Understanding Your Target Customer is Key
If you design a website you think will attract clients, but you don’t really know who your customers are and what they want to buy, it is unlikely that you will make much money. A website business is an extension or replacement for a standard storefront. You can send email to your existing clients and ask them to complete a survey or even while they are browsing on your website.
Ask them about their choices. Why do they like your products? Do you discount prices or offer coupons? Are your prices consistently lower than others? Is your shipping price cheaper? Do you respond faster to client questions? Are your product descriptions better? Your return policies and guarantees better than your competitor’s? To know your customer you can check credit card records or ask your customer to complete a simple contact form with name, address, age, gender, etc. when they purchase a product.
Does your website give enough contact information?
When you sell from a website, your customer can buy your products 24 hrs a day and also your customers may be from other states that or thousands of miles away. Always provide contact information, preferably on every page of your website, complete with mailing address, telephone number and an email address that reaches you. People may need to contact you about sales, general information or technical problems on your site. Also have your email forwarded to another email address if you do not check your website mailbox often. When customer wants to buy online provide enough options like credit card, PayPal or other online payment service.
I think that everyone who visits this article website is looking for ideas that they can put into action when it comes to pleasing their customer. We all are striving to learn more and more about the ways of the online customer. This is different in many different ways than if you had been running a ma and pa type shop in your local town. Many things are the same, but many are different. I hope this helps you think about what you can do to keep your customer at your website longer. You all can come up with many fun and interesting ideas, I'm sure.
Both Leva Duell & T. Detty are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.
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