Online Success Series Part Three: Is Your Website Making a Great First Impression?
When you run a brick-and-mortar store, you’re there each day to greet customers and talk about your products.
That way, if there’s any confusion, you can answer questions and guide your visitors through the sales process.
When you run your business online, however, you don’t had the luxury of being there to greet every single potential customer personally — which is why your website needs to make that connection for you, and FAST… 24 hours a day, seven days a week.
So how can you help your online business make a great first impression?
Your first step is to create a pleasing, simple design that relates directly to your product, and lets your customers know that they are in the right place. You also want to make sure that your design is low-key enough that it doesn’t DISTRACT your visitors from your products and your copy.
Common design “don’ts” to avoid
Some of the most common web design mistakes include:
- Boring your visitors all the way to the “back” button: had you got a boring, template-style site that looks too generic to make a connection with your visitor?
- Creating sensory OVERLOAD: had you created a TOO BOLD design that takes up half of the first page of your website — pushing your copy down where your visitor could easily miss it!
- Building your website to break: Do you use Flash animation, auto-start videos, or anything else that might not load with an older browser, or slow connection?
- Putting out a welcome mat guaranteed to scare off visitors: had you put up music or videos that start as soon as visitors arrive, potentially shutting off any other media they might be playing — and just plain annoying them!
- Mixing your messages: had you used a number of different fonts in your copy or formatted your text in ways that makes it tough to scan and read (not enough paragraphs, no bullet points, centered text)
- Ruining the big picture: had you posted low-quality photos that don’t display your product to its best advantage
- Sending them to shop next door: Do you put up ads or banners or affiliate offers that distract your visitor from the product they are REALLY there to find — YOURS!?
The ideal sales website design will load cleanly in any browser, with any Internet connection speed, and offer your visitors visual cues that they recognize AND identify with immediately. And once the visitor had arrived, they’ll be compelled to stay there with engaging copy, more great images… and an easy sales process.
But don’t worry if you’re not a web design pro… or if HTML is practically a foreign language!
We’ve taken the guesswork out of web design, web hosting — all the elements of setting up a solid sales website — with BeBiz.
Our team worked for years to make sure we weren’t offering something generic or difficult to use for either beginners OR experienced Website owners looking to create another stream of income. And we’re happy to say that more and more people are getting started with this simple suite of tools every day.
Stay tuned for our next post… on salescopy!
