What If Your Business Needs A Website?

October 23, 2009

Simple, Elegant And Extremely Easy, Always Keep Your Customer Value In Mind In Website Design.

John Mignano
John Mignano

Is web presence a necessity for every business today?

Well, the truth customer research.

And only you can answer that question. For starters what is your customer strategy?

Are your prospective customers searching or using the web to find your business?

Yes! Then a website for your business is even more important especially for strategic marketing based on customer consumer surveys.

However, a website is much more than a brochure or showroom because the primary purpose is to communicate to your target audience.

These days it’s all about the customer experience.

Bear in mind very few sales happen on the first point of contact.

You need to follow up and you need to build rapport with your prospects, and instil confidence and customer satisfaction.

Your prospects need to know the benefits of doing business withyou and they are making the right decision. This can take several follow up letters or emails.

The fact is 63% of sales can be lost because the TIMING wasn’t right for the prospect or they were simply not followed up.

You’d be amazed by the number of people who fail to follow up a prospect simply because they said “NO” the first time they were asked.

Your ability to follow up prospects and enquiries is pivotal to your success in business.

Want to cost-effectively compete with much bigger companies?

Now ask yourself the question: Does my business need a website?

In reality, almost every business these days needs a website, so the short answer is yes, but before you start hiring a programmer and graphic designer…

You need to clear know what your overall objective is and how your website will accomplish it.

Does your website need lots of fancy bells and whistles?

Keep the feel of your website appropriate to the type of business you have.

We have simply been spoilt by all the widgets and applications available.

You want an appropriate color scheme and graphic that convey the image of a professional with a font and a website that’s easy to read and navigate.

The website should be designed for your customer’s needs and what they would like to know as well as what you want to communicate.

Put a “Opt-in Box” on every page. Don’t make your visitors hunt for it (more on this topic in a moment).

When you do get an email respond to it as soon as possible because the name of the game is customer service.

24 hours isn’t unreasonable but the longer you wait to respond the higher chance your visitor will lose trust and look for what they want else where.

That means on a competitor’s site.

When designing the website, ease of navigation should be a high priority.

Confused customers will leave a site in frustration and that means you may have lost a sale.

Keep the navigation as consistent as possible across all your pages. Always have a clearly marked link that gets back to your home page.

Fancy graphics and flash may look pretty but if they take too long to load it irritates visitors. Keep graphics appropriate and don’t overuse them.

Write the content of your website for human readers not search engine spiders.

Keep the paragraphs short.

The length of the webpage should be about 350- 400 words.

If you have more to say on the subject, continue on a separate page.

Check the grammar and spelling.

Errors say you’re sloppy and careless and that’s probably not the image you want to portray to potential customers.

Use headings and subheadings to break up your written content.

Many people will prefer to skim the page to find what they’re looking for rather than read every word.

Make it easy for them by using the headings…

Vary the look of the page by using:

  • Bullet points
  • Check marks
  • Changing colors (no more than 3)
  • Changing fonts
  • Indenting content

Just don’t get carried away…

Too many variations and colors are distracting as well as the page starts to look cluttered and difficult to read.

Use white space around the content and graphics.

Don’t let your text bump up right next to a graphic, that makes the text hard to read.

If your site is an ecommerce storefront where you sell products, make sure your shopping cart software, credit card processing and gateway processor are all coordinated to work with each other.

Most do, but not every piece of software will communicate with every other piece of software.

Select the software based on ease of customer use as much as ease of use for you.

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