Some of you know that Homestead has a Design Services group that builds websites and online stores for members who want help with their designs. They’ve also analyzed a lot of other sites to suggest changes that business owners can make to maximize their results from the SearchLight marketing program. Because of what they do, they know what works well for websites and what doesn’t. The principles they follow can be useful to anyone building or maintaining a website, so I’ve invited Pamela to share some of their ideas with you – Rochelle.
Design concepts can change, but no matter how many sites we build for our members some principles remain the same. I’ve put together a list of some of them here that you can use as a guide for turning your own site into an efficient, professional online presence for your business.
Let’s start out with a couple of common website problems that can hurt your chances of converting a visitor to a customer:
- Site is difficult to navigate — If visitors to your site can’t find their way to the information they need quickly, they’ll likely give up and look elsewhere.
- Site looks unprofessional — If your site is cluttered or visually unappealing, it can be a turnoff to visitors and affect the way they perceive your company, no matter how successful your business actually is.
These problems are common but easy to fix:
- Consider your site goals— What do you want your customer to do on your site? Whatever it is, make sure your home page highlights information that will help them do what you want, like your phone number if you want them to call you.
- Optimize your layout — Recent studies show that visitors scan websites from the top left corner to the lower right. So the best place for your navigation menu is near the top of the page or vertically on the left, and make sure you keep key points about your business near the top so your visitors won’t have to scroll down to find it.
- Keep your site design simple —Try using a standard design with a simple color scheme of 2-3 colors for all your pages, so that your logo, text, and background images have a consistent look no matter what page your customer is viewing. Visitors shouldn’t feel like they’re going to a completely different site when they navigate to another page; a site with an inconsistent look from page to page can undermine your company’s credibility.
- Organize your site navigation — It’s easy to overload your navigation menu with too many buttons or links. You don’t need to list every one of your pages in your navigation menu; think of it as a Table of Contents, rather than an Index. For example, if you have separate pages for different services you offer, try linking those individual service pages from one main Services page. A good basic navigation we use frequently is: Home, About Us, Services, Testimonials, and Contact Us.
- Make your text work for you — Be concise, using just enough words for people to clearly understand what you offer without overwhelming them. Consider using bullet points to break up large amounts of text so your page will be easier to read, and use bold text sparingly; if your entire paragraph is bold, how will your visitors know what’s important?
- Make your images look their best — Re-size your images with a photo editing tool before adding them to your site. There are many tools out there for free that can easily crop excess background so the focus of your image is clear.
- Test your online store — If you sell things online, test your site by placing an order yourself and see what you’re asking your customers to do. Verify that the shipping and sales tax you’ve set up is correct, and that your return policies are clearly stated on your site.
- Give visitors a reason to come back — Update your content often so that people see your site as a useful resource. One of the worst things you can do is leave outdated information on your site, like listing an event as upcoming when it has already passed. Offer your visitors fresh content and you’ll keep your site on their radar.
Remember, your website speaks for you so make sure it’s saying the right thing as efficiently as possible. If there’s one thing my team has learned, it’s that less is sometimes much, much more.
And be sure to check your Site Statistics regularly. It’s typical to see the number of visitors to your home page taper off as they navigate to other pages of your site. But if you see a severe drop-off, that’s a good sign that there’s something about your home page you need to fix so it stops turning visitors away before they can move further into your site.
I hope you find these tips helpful. Good luck with your site, and if you have any questions about design please let us know!
March 19, 2009 at 6:01 am |
As usual, your suggestions and help is valuable, but I sure would like to see one big improvement to your site design tools and that is the ability to work with WordArt or a similar font tool that would allow us flexibility with font designs, shading, fills and outlines, etc.
Look at Microsoft Office Word 2007 or better and you can see what I mean. There’s so much you can do with that program but nothing can be transfered directly to the website.
Now, if you do have some tool that can do all that, I have not found it yet and i would definetly like to know about it.
In sumation, lettering (font design) is poor within the tools provided and that is sooo important in designing a good looking site.
Thank you.
March 19, 2009 at 5:34 pm |
I had Homestead to build my site, advertize in the directory and every where else I could, followed all advices given to me by the Homestead, and I still do not get very many hits. I don’t know what else to do. If anyone can give me more advices that work, I am open to hear from you.
March 24, 2009 at 5:20 pm |
Pamela, thanks for these great tips. I particularly am drawn to the last one, checking your site statistics.
I study my Real Tracker results, provide with my Homestead account, everyday. By doing this I am able to see which pages are getting traffic and where the visitors are coming from.
Once I know what is working then I begin to focus my attention on those pages and certain keyword phrases that are yielding results.
Over time the traffic increases because I am building upon a foundation of things that the statistics revealed were already working.
This is how we increase traffic to our websites.
April 5, 2009 at 5:01 pm |
I found an easy to use menu maker called DHTML Menu Studio (http://www.xtreeme.com/dhtml/) that makes great drop down menu that works quite well with Homestead. It is great when you want something a little more flashy than the Homestead Navigation Tool. It is not quite so intimidating as a lot of other menu making tools I tried out many of which did not work well with Homestead.
Elaine Sigmon, I took a look at your web site. Overall it is a good site but just a little too focused toward one group of people which is why you are not going to get a lot of hits. My brother is a lawyer with the same problem. Your site could use a little work as some elements are not alined properly and you have some grammer issues “you need to sale your bird” should be “you need to sell your bird”. Get out and get listed on all the bird forums and blogs that you can find. This will help a little bit and is a form of free advertising. Being online is better than not having a web site at all. It all takes time, nothing happens over night, and the more you can do to get notice the better. If they have bulletin boards in your local pet stores you can put up ads with your .com name. Try link exchanges with other web sites. The more stuff you have out there the better. Also, add that you have birds for sale on your home page, helps with keyword searches. Also the kind of birds for sale will also help.
August 25, 2009 at 2:36 pm |
r.b. chandler,
i read your mention of a drop down menu that interfaces w/ homestead. i am spread thin trying to run a business; and i’d be grateful if you could explain the tool you mentioned. thanks.
April 7, 2009 at 5:29 pm |
Hi Elaine,
We took a look at your site to see if we could help. Your basic layout looks ok, but by reviewing your site statistics we can see that the people who find your site on the search engines often don’t continue browsing beyond your home page. That’s a common problem, and in your case I think you may be able to remedy it with a few changes to improve the usability of your site:
* Make sure everything on your home page is working properly; we noticed broken images in your header that can really detract from the image of your site.
* Make sure your content stays within your design and doesn’t drift outside the borders of your pages. Images or text that just “float” along the side of the page look like they don’t belong there, again detracting from the professional image of your site.
* To maintain a consistent design, try to use the same images in the header on each of your pages, or at least place images in the same position in each header.
* Consider using a section of your home page to feature one of your products and talk about its benefits. After all, you want people to buy your products, right? You can change this section often to keep your home page fresh.
* Remove the banner ads on your home page. Since these ads can conflict with your own products, you should consider using them sparingly on specific, targeted pages instead of your home page. For example, if you want to place an ad for a magazine, you might want to write an article about outside resources and include a mention of that magazine as a good resource. That magazine ad would then be a good addition to that specific page. If you keep that ad on your home page, there is no context for it, so there isn’t any particular reason for someone to click on the ad and buy a subscription.
I hope these suggestions help you keep your visitors browsing once they get to your site. I’m working on a new post right now that will put together other suggestions for how to get more traffic, so stay tuned!
April 16, 2009 at 12:14 pm |
I am just developing my site now. Good clear advice. Thanks.
May 7, 2009 at 5:33 pm |
I agree with Gus. It is a extreme challenge to find balance with the very small selection of fonts that you have. I want to do things that are directly a part of the site instead of having to create it in Adobe CS, save as jpg, then bring it in. This gets to be painsaking. If I could have an assortment of fonts to create with that would be hot! Do you plan on giving us more in this area anytime soon?
July 14, 2009 at 5:27 pm |
Give visitors a reason to come back — Update your content often so that people see your site as a useful resource. One of the worst things you can do is leave outdated information on your site, like listing an event as upcoming when it has already passed. Offer your visitors fresh content and you’ll keep your site on their radar.
WE NEED THIS COMMENT FUNCTION ADDED TO SITEBUILDER!!!
July 31, 2009 at 3:34 am |
How can I resize or rather increase the width of my site? Should I change my template which I quite like?