Online sales depend on getting targeted visitor traffic to your site, but how do you convince them to buy? Your goal is to convert window shoppers into paying customers. These are important strategies in business website design.

1. USP: State your unique selling proposition. This is what sets you apart from your competition. This could be free shipping, unique products or a lowest price guarantee.
2. Targeting: Target your visitor to bring in ready buyers. Certain keywords have a much higher conversion rate. This is especially important in pay per click (PPC).
3. Content: Use clear website copy that emphasizes the benefits of buying from you. Your visitor is in a hurry, show your product advantages in bullet points and even compare your product to your competitors. Include a clear call to action.
4. Build Trust: Everything about your website should be designed to build trust. It should be fast loading, well organized, have clear navigation, be user friendly and work in all major browsers.
5. Testimonials: Customer testimonials build instant credibility. Keep your testimonials in their original form including grammatical errors. Provide contact details for the people giving the testimonial.
6. Make it Easy: Make it easy for people to use, easy to find information and easy to find the buy now button. Think like your customer and make every step of the purchase easy.
7. Contact: If buyers have questions, can you be reached? This can be phone, email or online live support. A quick answer can keep buyers on track to purchase.
8. Returns Policy: Returns on web purchases is a major concern to most buyers. A clear and liberal returns policy calms these fears.
9. Assure and Secure: Assure your visitors that the personal information that they share is totally secure by posting a privacy policy. Use only a secure payment gateway.
10. Payment Options: Buyers like choices. Offer multiple payment methods like credit cards, Paypal and even pay by check options. Consider alternatives to the usual methods.

There are definite steps you should do to get your website to convert browsers into paying customers. A visitor needs to know he has arrived at the right place to get help.

1. Target your audience: Design your home page for your target audience so you can answer their most burning question. If you have multiple small niches, make a different landing page for each group.
2. Get their attention: When they first arrive, they need to immediately see your sales pitch, your offering and even your order button. Don’t make them scroll down or switch pages.
3. Provide Quality: Your content and your products need to appear top notch. The images you select and the words you use reflect on the quality you provide. The key is to show what a great value your product or service is.
4. Engage your visitor: Your writing style needs to excite and grab your visitor’s attention. Use an active voice to keep them motivated.
5. It’s about their need: Spend less time writing about your company and answer how you will solve their problem. Remember, your primary duty is to give them what they need.
6. Trust Factor: Assure your customers that their information is safe and that your company is trustworthy. Always have a privacy policy. Join organizations such as Truste and BBBOnLine. Place their logos on your site.
7. Watch your stats: Don’t just put your website up and forget it. Watch your metrics and website statistics. Continue to make changes and measure traffic and track conversion rates.

Pretty just isn’t enough for a business website. You may have a great Flash design that is professional, with powerful imagery and a logical sales flow. The issue is that visitors are unable to find your site in the organic search results. This type of site must depend on referral traffic such as paid sponsored links for visitors.

Penn State researchers did a study and found that over 80% of the searches went to organic search results. They found that consumers are suspicious of sponsored links and they favor organic search results as being more trusted.

Competition for first page Google results is fierce. It’s like building a high performance racing vehicle. Street cars are no match for top race cars. Race cars are carefully engineered, built to very exacting tolerances, precision tuned and thoroughly tested in order to get a top placement in a race. It is not different for a website to compete for a top search placement.

With Google now indexing 25 billion pages it takes special effort to come up in the first page of their search results. SEO design requires careful research and planning prior to the design process. Keyword research, site architecture, navigation schemes, wire framing and cross-link schemes need to be planned in advance. Focused content should be written to be keyword rich and have maximum marketing impact.

To get great SEO results, each page within your website will be individually competing for a position with the 25 billion other pages. Each page needs to be focused and optimized around the specific content on that page.

SEO Design requires a well thought out inbound linking strategy. These should be from highly relevant sites. Highly competitive sites will require multiple linking strategies to be a top performer.

Your business website design should reflect your marketing goals. You should be making decisions about your website to improve your marketing results. This usually means improve usability and optimize for search.

1. Define Your Goals: Start with your business goals for your website redesign. What do you need to accomplish? This could be to attract new clients, generate leads or to help brand your company as the premier provider in your industry.
2. Keep the Best: What does your current website do well? This could be servicing existing customers or converting visitors into paying customers. Preserve what you are already doing right and improve from there.
3. Website Styles: Just like fashions, website design changes. For instance, Flash intro pages were popular until web designers realized that users didn’t like them and they caused search rankings to plummet.
4. Branding and Image: When people visit your site, they see it as a reflection of your company. It is important for your site to reflect the identity and ideals (brand) of your company. Your company can appear as an industry leader.
5. Website Traffic: Your goal should be to get more visitors and more leads. Design your site with organic search in mind. Select relevant keyword phrases that will be used in page names, body text and link text. Websites should be built in XHTML / CSS to be search engine friendly.
6. Customers Expectations: Look at your industry, what is expected? A website in the financial products industry is expected to be very business professional. A medical website has a clean design and uses cheerful colors.
7. Watch your competition: Look at what your competition offers and stay ahead of them. Look at the image your website gives your business. Is your information searchable? What features do your competitors offer?
8. Attract and Convert: This should be your central focus for your site. What action do you want from your visitors? Build this into your navigation. Each page should have its own call to action.

MarketingSherpa data puts the average ecommerce shopping-cart abandonment rate at 59.8%. Why do nearly 60% of online shoppers abandon their carts at some point in the process? The answer is that they lose trust, are surprised with unexpected charges or become frustrated with the process. Here are ways to improve your business web design and make the shopping experience easier for your customers.

1. Show Shipping Prices: No-one likes hidden or surprise fees, especially as they have their credit card in hand and waiting to pay. Allow customers to see shipping charges up front by entering only their zip code.
2. Eliminate Registration to Purchase: Remove Member Registration until after the sale is completed. Permit an anonymous shopping experience. In a JupiterResearch Consumer Survey 19.3 percent of respondents didn’t want to register to make a purchase.
3. Promotion Code: According to a study done at Vanderbilt, the presence of a promo code causes people to leave. People without codes feel like they are paying too much and leave at a 20% or so higher rate than if no promo code field exists on the page.
4. Build Confidence and Trust: Streamline your checkout process. Let customers know how many steps there. Display a progress indicator to let them know where they are, and how much further they need to go. Clearly identify each next step.
5. Provide Purchase Options: Offer phone numbers or an online chat assistance. Some visitors may be uncomfortable with completing a purchase online and want to place an order by phone or mail in an order with a check.
6. Re-assure Shoppers: Prominently display text that says “Returns are Easy” that is linked to your returns policy. Add security icons to overcome consumer security concerns. Use third party services like Hacker Safe and VeriSign.
7. Product Thumbnail Images: Make it easy for visitors to remember what they are purchasing. Display product thumbnail images next to the product names in the shopping cart as a visual reminder. Remember, visitors don’t know the product names as well as you do.

The home page is the most important page in business web design. It is the page that first greets visitors. A visitor will spend 3-5 seconds scanning your home page and then decide to enter your site or leave in a click. Your home page is also the most valued page by the search engines as they look for keywords.

1. Potential Customer: Who are your targeted customers and what are they looking for? What answers are they searching for? Think about the customers that you already market to. What questions do they ask? What triggers them to buy from you? Tailor your home page and write to them.
2. Answer the Question: A visitor comes to your site with an assortment of questions, but they all add up to the same thing. Can you help me with my problem? This means when writing to your customer, you need to address THEIR concerns. Talk about solutions not your product or service.
3. ABC Text: What are the ADVANTAGES, BENEFITS, and CONVENIECES of using your product or service? This is the heart of what a home page needs to say. The question that a visitor asks is what can you do for me that your competition won’t? Remember write about how you can help your customer and not so much about your company.
4. Curb Appeal: Research has shown that within the first 3 to 5 seconds a customer makes an initial decision if they will consider doing business with you and your company. This means that you need to convey your marketing message at a glance. The challenge becomes how to write to an audience 3 to 5 seconds and still have enough content that a search engine will see your content as valuable.
5. Call to Action: You should place action words some where prominent. Use words such as CALL NOW, Request for a FREE Quote, Talk with our experts now! Using short phrases with an immediate word encourages the visitor to make a quicker decision. Figure out what you want from the customer and encourage them to do it!

A well written home page greets a visitor with solutions to their problem. It is organized to be quickly scanned. It shows how you are different and why your solutions are the best.

We specialize in quality business web design and I get requests regularly from businesses that would like me to look at their website and give an opinion on what I think. Sometimes I am quite surprised on what I find. I always will ask five questions before I check out the site.

Initial Questions

1. What is the purpose of the site?
2. What action do you want from a visitor?
3. What are you selling?
4. Who is your targeted customer?
5. Where do you want your traffic come from?

This is what I look for.

1. Initial Impression: Does the website have curb appeal for your targeted customer? Does it give the proper impression based on who your customer is? Obviously you want a very different look for a website about children’s motivation than for business services. Look at the website from the eyes of your customer.
2. Initial Message: Does your website convey the essential message in the first 3-5 seconds. If not, new visitors are gone in a click. This last week, I looked at a major restaurant supply website that had industry news and recipes on their home page. There was no mention of what services they provide or the advantages of using them.
3. Call to Action: Is there a clear path to action? This could be call now, buy online, request a quote or download this eBook. This should be clear from the home page. Is the navigation arranged in a logical selling process?
4. Traffic Source: If the website is expected to bring in traffic from search engines, I look for evidence of keywords being used in the body text, headings, link text, etc. I look for structural problems, and evidence that the website is using duplicate content or part of an auto-generated website such as some real estate or travel agent sites.

Effective  business website design needs to produce the results desired. This could be leads, sales or phone calls. If you are unsure about your website, please ask us for our opinion. Please reference this blog posting and let us know the answers to the initial questions above. Request a website analysis

The term ‘breadcrumb’ comes from the fairy tale Hansel and Gretel where the children leave a trail of crumbs to find their way back out of the forest.

In business web design, breadcrumbs usually appear horizontally near the top of a page. They are a method for telling the visitor where they are. Users can “jump” to prior pages without using the back button by simply clicking on one of the breadcrumb links. Breadcrumbs show a path home for the visitor. They may look something like this:

Home >> Men’s Clothing >> Dress Shirts >> Van Heusen

Breadcrumbs or breadcrumb trail is especially useful on complex websites where there are many levels of content. They show a linear path in websites that are organized in a hierarchical structure. When a visitor arrives into a site from a search, they can quickly orient themselves and begin moving around the site.

There are three types of breadcrumbs that can be used.

1. Path: This shows the actual trail the visitor followed to arrive at a page. This is usually generated dynamically. In the breadcrumb example above, the “dress shirts” section could have been found by either going to “men’s clothing” or by going to the “sales” area.
2. Location: This shows the standard path a visitor would follow and represents the site structure. This is regardless of how visitors actually arrive to a page.
3. Attribute: This shows all the different areas the page may be listed under. In our “dress shirts” example, shirts may be listed in the “under $25”, “On Sale” and “Van Heusen” Sections. It would contain all three attribute breadcrumbs.

Breadcrumb navigation is an important navigational aid and it should be clearly visible. Here are some basic rules to follow in setting up breadcrumb navigation.

1. Position it on the top of the page
2. Include 1-2 words that summarize the page title.
3. Always include the full path from the home page
4. Make it obvious what part of the breadcrumbs are clickable links.
5. Do not link the current active page.
6. Do not include on the home page because it would only contain the word “Home.”

Business websites should be designed to be inviting for visitors and for search engines. This means a balance of graphics and text. Text is required for search engines to under what your website is about.

Do…

• …create a professional BIG company image. The Internet is a creates a level playing field for businesses of all sizes. Use your company website to present you as a competent quality business.
• …grab someone’s attention in 3 seconds or less. When visitors arrive you have approximately 3 seconds of their attention before they decide to leave or look around. Make it clear what you can do for your visitor.
• ...design a simple and intuitive navigation. Make it easy for visitors to find their way around your website. Follow you natural selling process.
• …have a clear call to action to get results. People will do what you ask. Simply asking them to “Buy Now” can convert an interested prospect into a paying customer.
• …put your contact info on every page. Once you have your visitor’s attention, make it easy for them to reach you.

Don’t…

• …use blinking or scrolling text or auto-loading sound. This annoys people and they will quickly leave your website.
• …use graphic intensive slow loading pages. If a page takes over a few seconds to load, visitors will quickly leave and never see your great looking website.
• …use an Intro or Splash page. The search engines place great importance on the home page and with little or no text you site will never get high search engine rankings.
• …design a website in frames. Frames are cool and easy for designers, but search engines dislike websites built in frames.
• …have pages that are full width. Most monitors today are very wide. Pages that stretch full width are very difficult to read.

Eye tracking studies give web designers insight into what attracts the attention of visitors. This is very important in business web design. Once you have optimized your website to bring in traffic, following a few design rules can make sure you catch your reader’s attention. After all, most visitors make up their mind to stay of go in the first few seconds.

Results from the Nielsen Norman Group’s study show that the dominant reading pattern looks somewhat like an “F”. Web visitors begin in the upper left and sweep to the right. They then drop down the page a bit and do a shorter horizontal sweep and then they scan down the left side content.

From eye tracking studies we can establish 10 guidelines for web design.

1. Content / Images in the upper left quadrant are most likely to be seen
2. Right side content and content lower on the page is less likely to be seen.
3. Larger font headlines draw the eye.
4. Shorter paragraphs are read more than large blocks of text.
5. Smaller font body text is read and larger font body text is scanned.
6. Numbers are read as numerals, but skipped over as text.
7. Bigger images get more attention than smaller images.
8. Bulleted or numbered lists hold readers attention
9. Banner ads are ignored.
10. Fancy fonts and fancy words look like promotion and are ignored.

The last point was well illustrated with the U.S. Census Bureau’s homepage. In a study, 86% of users failed to the country’s current population which was presented in a large red font.