Don’t waste your visitors time

Time is money. Most people decide whether they are interested in what the website has to offer in just to seconds. Therefore make sure your landing page provides the most crucial and appealing information about your business.

Number one time waster is a heavy loading pages with lot’s of flash animations and pictures. Make sure your web pages are not too heavy otherwise you might loose your visitors before they entered your website.

Most of the visitors need to find what they are looking for fast, otherwise they look for it elsewhere. As a webmaster you must make sure your data is well categorizes and divided to relevant pages, categories, headlines and sub-titles. A visitor must be able to navigate your website easily and successfully.

Avoid too much “Special affects”

By this I mean don’t include too much Flash movies and avoid using music if you don’t have to. As we mentioned earlier, Flash has a large loading time which damages viewer experience, besides too much Flash may be annoying and search engines can’t read it.

Music is a great thing, but somehow music and websites do not fit too well. If you want to put some background tune anyway, make sure a user can silence it quickly and easily. Or in contrary, let the user click “Play” and begin the music when he decides.

Pop-ups and new pages

If you have links in your site, I strongly advise you not to use the pop-up option and not to open these links in new window. Seemingly pop-ups and new windows are a very good idea if we don’t want the visitor to navigate from our website but many years of experience shows that users prefer to click “Back” buttons. As to pop-ups, most of browsers tend to block them, and you don’t want to waste your viewer time on enabling pop-ups.

Text

Use standard fonts which are supported by all browsers, like Arial and Times New Roman. You don’t want your viewers to get gibberish and go away from your website. Don’t use very small or very large fonts. You don’t want your pages to smear for miles and you don’t want to scare away people with poor vision.

Gally Reznor is a web developer and marketing manager at http://Site123.com. She has a large experience in planning and creating e-commerce and other business websites.

Regardless of our connection speed, Internet users expect information to be readily obtainable, pages to download quickly and solutions at the click of the mouse. As such, you should look at your home page as your Sale point. Have you explained succinctly what you are selling and included links to more detailed information? Note that on the first page, you should try to pre-sell your potential customers on the benefits of your product or service.

If you are offering many products or services, place only the most attractive on the first page. Do not overload your first page. People might get confused if you provide too much information on one page.

That is one of the reasons why I always advise my customers not to use flash intros on their first page or at the very lease, allow them to skip through it. Today, internet users have less patience to wait and will move on quickly if pages take too long too load or if they have to “wait through” fancy openers that are all flash and no substance.

Site Structure

Structure of your site should be dedicated to one goal only. Leading the visitor from your home page (pre-sale point) to different pages (sale points) on your site.

Structure of your site should be as simple as 1 – 2 – 3.

The 1 should be your home page, where you provide the basic information (read benefits) about your product or service.

The 2 should be a “more details” page where you will list and elaborate on benefits and prices of your product

And 3 should be your “add to cart” or “contact us” page.

Navigation Structure

If you are serious about having your business on the Internet, do not experiment with the navigation of the site. Keep it simple and easy to use. If your pages are long, place a menu on the bottom of the page to save your users from scrolling to the top of the page to reach the menu.

Text

Do you believe that people read everything written on your page? They don’t. What they do is SCAN. They are scanning your page, looking for specific information regarding your company, what you have to offer, pricing and how to contact you. What you say and how you say it can mean the difference between a visitor and a sale.

For first timers, the look and content of our pages may evolve based on customer needs and comments. So… always, be sure to include search options in case visitors don’t find what they are looking for as well as readily obtainable contact information. Most importantly, make sure someone is available to answer questions. Never keep a potential first-time customer waiting for information.

In many cases, search option will keep the visitor on your site, giving you one more chance to convert the visitor into a customer.

Creating Emphasis

Having in mind that users scan the pages, determining what to emphasize and creating emphasis on your pages is very important.

Eye catching details will help you to lead the visitor to the pages on your site that you want to be exposed, and it will increase your chances to convert the visitor into a customer.

Graphics

Graphics should emphasize the benefits of your products or service. Don’t use graphics unrelated to your product or service. Placing the graphic on the site just because you like the graphic, and you think that your site looks better with it is simply wrong. Use that space to explain to your visitors why they should buy from you and not from someone else.

Graphics should emphasize quality of your product or service. If you can’t find or create such a graphic, use text. It’s that simple.

Speed

Faster is better. There are still millions of people still using dial up for their connection. So try to make the download time for your site as short as possible. Remember, time is money and the longer it takes to download your website, the faster potential customers will go elsewhere for their business.

Zoran Makrevski is the president of SEO.Goto.gr. We offer customized and affordable http://seo.goto.gr/seo-services.html SEO Services.