Tips for Designing a Website for Sales

Whether you’re looking to shift a sales function onto the world of e-commerce or you have a new business that will be selling a product or service on the Web, you need a website that is designed and built to sell. Here are some simple design and marketing tips that will help your website stand out from the crowd.

• Purpose

A great place to start is determining the purpose of your website. Some of the many reasons for creating a web presence include building up a brand, providing customer service and support, selling products or services, capitalizing on online efficiencies to save money or a combination of these. What is the purpose of your website?

• Navigation

Once you have a good handle on the purpose of your website, you need to think about how you’re going to divide up the information you’ll be presenting. You want your site to be well-organized, easy to navigate and designed to guide your prospective customers towards the checkout page. The last thing you want is your visitors getting lost or frustrated. Remember: leaving your site and your business is just a click away – and chances are they won’t come back.

Also, your homepage is the gateway to your business, so make sure it includes a statement that clearly communicates what your company does, including a unique selling proposition that will draw in your audience.

• Design

It goes without saying (but we’re going to say it anyways) that your business website should have an attractive look and feel. A simple, clean and professional design that uses lots of white space is a good place to start. Nowadays there are some great Small Business Panel products that empower you to create and publish the website yourself. These SMB Panels offer loads of flexible design templates, easy-to-follow setup wizards, email addresses with your domain and e-commerce functionality for setting up your online store – all for a low monthly fee that includes domain hosting (which you’ll need anyways). The great thing about a reliable SMB Panel is that it puts you in the driver’s seat when it comes to managing your online identity, unless of course you have the budget to hire a website designer to do it for you.

• Marketing

Content & Keywords

Your website’s design should reinforce the content on your site (not the other way around); making the content stand out so visitors will actually read it. Design alone will not sell, so you need strong, targeted content because this content will be doing most of the work. A good place to start is to approach your content like a conversation between you and your prospective customers. This will help draw them in and connect to what you’re trying to communicate. Talk to them, not at them. And if you don’t have a flair for words, consider looking to a professional business writer to take the pain out of writing the content yourself.

Also, make sure the first thing your visitors see really grabs their attention and this means paying attention to the flow of the page and content. You want to direct their focus to the items that will create both an interest in your product and a desire to buy it.

Your web pages should also help to index your website with search engines by attracting search engine bots. To help achieve this, your website should contain the following: titles with the most important keywords from the page that are a maximum of 80 characters; headlines in HTML including at least one instance of your important keywords; meta tags, which are basically one to two sentences approximately 250 characters in length that describe the content on the specific web page; a first paragraph that includes the main keywords for the page and hyperlink text and file names because they’re ranked higher in search engines since words contained in hyperlinks are considered more important by search engines. Basically, you want to help search engines recognize and index the actual content on your web pages appropriately.

Finally, many companies are taking the two-way conversation that a website can create to the next level by introducing blogs and/or feedback pages where customers and visitors can discuss and post thoughts and feedback. This can help reinforce the bond between you and your customers. Introducing social networking to your business is also becoming more and more popular. Learn more about how social networking can help your business by reading our blog, How Can Twitter and Facebook Help My Business?

Image Selection

It’s important to carefully consider the message you’re trying to send when choosing images for your website. Meaningful images that provide a visual illustration of the message or feel you want to communicate are the most effective. The graphics on your site have a job and they can have a significant impact on how your prospective customers will feel when they visit your company online.

Choice Clarity

Giving visitors too many options can create something called choice paralysis, which basically says that when presented with too many choices, your customers may get confused and end up leaving your website without making any choice at all.

Keep your options as simple as possible to make it easier for visitors to find the right product or service for them. Visual cues that highlight the most popular product or service can be a useful way to direct prospective customers, and if it’s not the right one for them, they can still select another. The goal of highlighting the most popular product or service is to mitigate their potential confusion or uncertainty by providing them with a solid option instead of running the risk of choice paralysis.

Product Positioning

Although your online store doesn’t have the same advantage of a physical store in terms of letting your customers touch and feel the product before making a decision to purchase, you still need to showcase your product. Even Software as a Service providers need to consider what a potential customer will think about the look and feel of their program. Offering screen shots and online demos are a good way to accomplish this.

Right or wrong, good or bad, the fact is consumers evaluate products and make decisions about usability based on looks. A complicated, cluttered and even unattractive interface may invoke a negative assumption about usability, whereas a simple-looking and attractive interface can help visitors imagine using your product, getting you one step closer to a sale.

The Test Drive

Each moment your prospective customers spend trying out the features of your product or service is a moment invested in learning about it and using it. Depending on what you’re selling, consider letting visitors either use a portion of your product/service or offer full access for a limited trial period free of charge. There is no monetary commitment, but it may cause your visitors to begin relying upon what you’re selling, therein creating the potential to drive the conversion of prospects to customers.

Call to Action

When you consider both the design and content of each page on your website, you always need to be thinking about how you’re making the sale. Although this doesn’t mean having big “Order Now” buttons all over the page, it does mean having an intuitive location for a check-out link. You don’t want to leave visitors searching around the page for the link they need to close the sale.

Next action links on each page will also help optimize the flow of your web pages, which will in turn help to keep visitors engaged. Links like “Learn More”, “Try a Demo”, “Shop Now”, “Take a Tour” and “Ready to Order? Click here” can direct prospective customers to a page with more information about your product or service or to the actual page where they can place their order. Bottom line: always suggest where your visitor should go next.

The Parallels Small Business Panel offered by Robson Communications Inc. is a powerful, next-generation business-ready solution that can help you build your online identity faster and easier than you thought possible. Starting at just $9.99/mo and with no set-up fees, this SMB Panel is also highly affordable and has everything your small business needs in a hosting package.

We also offer a full suite of award-winning hosting solutions for your business. Contact us today to learn more!

Sincerely,

Jennifer Muzzin

Content Director
Robson Communications Inc.
1-877-472-3425