Luke Brown Marketing Blog

Archive for the ‘Website Design’ Category

Billionaire Mark Cuban and his friend Jason Calacanis both have excellent advice for start up businesses. Following up on yesterday’s post regarding outsourcing your internet marketing is part II.

Website design is definitely part of an internet marketing strategy. Designed properly, a website can be an around-the-clock sales rep. Designed poorly, it’s nothing but a passive expense.

The website should tie into your personal/corporate image and brand, be tailored towards your target market, and have ‘calls to action’, the forms, buttons or links which enable people to take action.

Numerous studies have shown page load speed and ability to navigate a site as the top two factors leading to user satisfaction. A recent survey showed men rated page load speeds most important while women rated ease of navigation as most important. Knowing your customer base and target market and using that information to design your website, will give you an advantage over your less-informed competitors.

Optimum Website Design Elements

No website design recommendation works for every site every time. These are statistically proven elements which work for the vast majority of sites.

* Search Box At Top Right. Approximately 55% of first time website visitors go directly towards a search box. They are known as Search Dominant. Approximately 20% use link navigation (Link Dominant) and 25% use both. The lack of a search box will increase your bounce rate, decrease the average time a user spends on your site and reduces the number of repeat visitors.

Search boxes for most sites of less than 5,000 pages cost less than $100 per year, while some are available free. No matter how friendly your site architecture and link navigation is, the addition of a search box will pay for itself many times over.

* Detailed Contact Us Page. No matter what industry you’re in, trust is the most difficult thing to sell. Your Contact Us page should be complete and detailed. It should include:

Company name. People want to know who they’re dealing with.

Physical address. The lack of a physical street address says you’re cheap, home-based or unprofessional – or all three. Virtual mailboxes with street addresses can be obtained inexpensively.

Phone number, preferably toll-free. A toll-free number says you’re professional, you want people to contact you, and you’re willing to pay for the call. Virtual toll-free phone numbers cost about $10.00 per month. A complete no-brainer.

Time zone and hours of operation. If you do business world wide, give potential customers the best chance to reach you by displaying your local time zone (Eastern, Central, Pacific, etc) and the UTC (Coordinated Universal Time) time.

Email address and a form. Leaving a message on a form or asking people to send you an email is a simple way to encourage communication. Clicking on the email address should automatically open an email. Just having the email address is not good enough any more.

* Fast Loading Pages. Lots of pictures, lots of content, and flash can cause a page to load slowly. Keeping these elements to a minimum gives you the fastest page load speeds possible. Use the free tool at gomez.com to check your website’s page load speed. It if takes longer than 2 seconds, you have work to do. See my detailed blog post about this subject here.

* Minimize The Clutter. Where do you want your website visitors to focus first? Too many distractions means they’ll miss what is most important on the web page. White space is your friend.

There are other design elements which can have a negative impact on your website visitors. They include auto-play audio and video (though they work great for some types of sites), big blocks of text (people scan websites, they don’t read them) and small fonts (anything small than 12 point is very difficult for most people to read), among many others.

For a fast and reasonably priced evaluation of your site, check out usertesting.com. For $29 you’ll get a video narration and written summary of your site’s good and bad points. You won’t be disappointed.

Common wisdom (is it really that common?) says any new business needs to have an internet presence. Business owners hear that repeated often and then make the decision to get a website. So far, so good. Then what?

Before you get a domain, a hosting company and a designer, you need to ask yourself the most important first question for a website: What is the major objective of your website?  Different answers mean different purposes. There are three major types of websites:

E-commerce

An e-commerce site sells mostly products. It usually has pictures of items, item descriptions, and some type of ’shopping cart’ (the system used to get the buyer’s information and accept payment). E-commerce sites need to be designed to inspire trust and to convert visitors into buyers through the process of CRO (conversion rate optimization).

Lead Generation (also called Lead Gen)

Some businesses look for leads for their sales department. They may have a product or service which is too complicated to sell online. Some of these companies ‘nurture’ these leads before handing them over to sales. This allows them to set aside leads which are not ready for the next sales step. Leads which come from highly interested and motivated buyers can quickly be turned over to sales.

Lead Generation websites tend to focus more on people, while e-commerce sites place more emphasis on product. Some Lead Gen sites are very simple, often only one page long. The product or service will help determine the simplicity or complexity of the site.

Informative

Some sites are designed strictly to provide information to interested parties. Many companies with informative sites are very successful in the offline world (medical, legal and accounting professionals, for example). Having an information website is a less expensive and more productive alternative to phone book ads and other direct marketing techniques.

The Bottom Line

All websites should generate trust and rapport and be representative of the type of industry in which the company does business. An attorney’s website should look much different than the website for ‘Carson’s Cakes and Cookies’.

Make your contact information easy to find. Make your site easy to navigate with fast-loading pages. Give visitors a chance to sign up for more information because a website’s list of customers is its most valuable asset.

Look at the websites of businesses similar to your to see what looks good and works well. Following these basics will help ensure your website gets the good start it deserves.