How to Tweak Your Website for More Leads and Sales

By: Eldo Barkhuizen
Submitted: 2007-01-17 16:43:04
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Make the following changes to your website and you'll see an immediate jump in your visitor response:

1. Long Words, Sentences, Lines and Blocks of Text

Studies have shown that

• reading from a computer screen is 25% slower than from paper

• 79% of visitors scan a screen page instead of reading word for word

Important! Web content should be easy to scan.

So use white space; subheadings; bullets; keywords highlighted, underlined, italicized or in bold; ellipses (...) and en dashes (–) between words.

Also put parentheses around text (for eye relief) ... and have lines no longer than around 65 characters (including spaces).

2. “It’s All About ME” v. “It’s All About YOU”

You must focus on your reader’s wants, not on showing off your business or website. People don’t visit your website to be told how wonderful you are – they come to get useful info that helps them.

3. Stunning Design and Graphics, but Little Content

The old saying “Content is king” is true for the Internet too. Words, not graphics, sell.

Do this test: take away the words from your website and see if the graphics alone convey your sales message. Now take away your graphics, but leave your words in place. Unlike graphics, your words alone can persuade a customer to buy.

Your best option – both good design and compelling text.

4. Trying to Sell Instead of Inform

People come to a website for solutions to a problem, not to buy. If they sense any sales pressure, you’ll lose them in the click of a mouse.

Make your website look like an editorial, not a sales pitch.

People want you to genuinely help them, not see them as just another sale.

This is very important, and most websites make this mistake!

5. Full of Hype

“Hype” is an outrageous claim without evidence to support it. Visitors want info, info, info, and proof (studies, testimonials, credentials) to back it up, not a slick cyber salesman trying to manipulate them into buying the latest and greatest.

6. Spelling and Grammar Mistakes

Screams, “Unproffesional!” (See what I mean?) Cuts your credibility, and credibility is vital. People won’t buy from you unless they trust you.

7. Using Flash Animations

Your job is to inform, not entertain. People come to your website looking for info to solve their problems.

It’s distracting and annoying trying to read text when a part of the page is moving. Slows people down, and most 21st-century visitors are in a hurry.

The last thing you want to do with precious visitor traffic that comes to your website is irritate them.

8. Using Pop-Up Ads

People don’t visit your website to buy (not at first, anyway), but to get info, as I’ve already said a few times. If you annoy them with pop-up ads, visitors may click away to another site.

Your aim is to keep visitors reading your website as long as possible, so you must make it “sticky” – have useful, unique content without annoying distractions that rudely intrude.

In a Gartner poll, 78% of respondents said they found pop-ups “very annoying.”

9. Bad Page Titles

Page titles must say what’s on each page – to help your visitor who wants to bookmark or save your page. Do all you can to make each visit easy and memorable.

10. Long, Dense Web Pages

Visitors are in a hurry – they don’t want to scroll through long pages of dense text to find info.

So use plenty of white space and put the most vital info at the top of your web pages.

Web content should be concise and useful to your visitors – 50% the length of its paper equivalent.

To sum up: web usability expert Jakob Nielsen says effective websites are concise, scannable, and objective.

© 2006 Eldo Barkhuizen BA, HDE

Article source: Expert Articles