Seven Tips For Building A Better Website To Convert Visitors Into Sales

Seven Tips For Building A Better Website To Convert Visitors Into Sales by autokid.  Available from <http://techfeatured.com/automotive/1945/seven-tips-for-building-a-better-website-to-convert-visitors-into-sales> [November 15, 2016] Photo Credit: flickr.com/medithIT

Ever wonder how to make your website better and ultimately increase your sales? Well, we’ve put together a quick guide to building a better website.

1. Make Sure Your Website Conveys Your Key Message Within 30 Seconds

When a visitor comes to your website, they should be able to easily see and navigate what options they have and be able to select one quickly. It should take less than 30 seconds for the visitor to load a web page and able to decide what to do next. If it takes longer than that, you’ll likely lose your audience. Remember, people have a short attention span and you only have seconds to win their hearts, so their mind will follow.

That means two things:

Make sure your page layout is clear and concise enough that with a quick glance, visitors can grasp your key message, and navigate to the information they want to learn about.

Do not overdo it on design and flash pages

2. Easy Navigation Means Easier And Improved Web Sales

Making your website easy to navigate is critical. Lots of small factors add up to create easy navigation and continuation of the sales funnel. For example, the best thing to do is to keep the number of steps to one or two options. The more steps a visitor has to go through, the more chances you’ll lose them as a customer.

The average human mind sees four or five items as one group, but when it encounters more than five items, it has to divide into small sub-groups to process them. It makes more sense to have your website have five (no more than six) navigation tabs. It makes it easier for your visitors to quickly find information and select where they want to go.

3. Keep Your Website Simple

One of the keys to a good website is simplicity. You’ve heard of the “KISS” principle? Keep It Simple Silly. This applies doubly for a website.

It’s easy to fall into the trap of using every possible feature for a website. If you add too much, beit offers, headlines, copy, flash elements, oversized fonts and a whole slew of other widgets, it’s likely your visitor is going to be overwhelmed.

4. Simple, Not Boring

Simple does not necessarily mean dull and boring. Many people confuse fancy widgets and effects with effective communication. What keeps it simple really means this: think about how people will be viewing your website and present your information to them in a way that emotionally connects with their needs and expectations.

Clean Design / Navigation + Clear Benefits = Good Website That Converts Visitors Into Sales

5. Good Website Navigation Means Information Should Be Only Three Clicks Away

One good rule to ensure website visitors is to make information be no more than three clicks away. One way to frustrate visitors – and thus get them to leave your site – is to make it hard to find information they want.

6. Benefits And Words Matter

Remember your fifth grade English teacher? Remember how she told you that good spelling and grammar was important? She was right.

The internet has far too many websites whose creators forgot the basics. Just because your website is online or your website might have many pages, it does not mean you can not forget to get back to the basics and make sure the words are correct. Your visitors will appreciate your professionalism.

7. A Website Design Is Important

75% of people make judgments about a website based on the look. So, it’s important that your website has a good design balance and has appealing graphics.

A balance between text and graphics. Unless the content dictates an all-text or an all-graphics site, use common sense and aesthetic judgment so that one does not overwhelm the other. Of course, it’s always a good idea to consult a professional advertising agency or graphic artist about creative development. Or at the very least look at other websites to get ideas on good design.

Seven Tips For Building A Better Website To Convert Visitors Into Sales by autokid.  Available from <http://techfeatured.com/automotive/1945/seven-tips-for-building-a-better-website-to-convert-visitors-into-sales> [November 15, 2016] Photo Credit: flickr.com/medithIT

Tips On How to Solve the Shopping Cart Abandonment Puzzle

Tips On How to Solve the Shopping Cart Abandonment Puzzle by Lucy Maher.  Available from <http://paymentweek.com/2016-11-14-tips-on-how-to-solve-the-shopping-cart-abandonment-puzzle-11984/> [Nov 14, 2016]

You can design your website to be mobile-friendly, engage the right search engine optimization (SEO) strategy to attract eyeballs, and create compelling content to engage visiting consumers.

But if your checkout process has inefficiencies, you could potentially lose sales from customers who abandon their shopping cart – an outcome that is more common than one may think, and for reasons that could easily be avoidable.

“Shopping cart abandonment can happen simply because the retailer didn’t accept the customer’s form of payment,” said Keith Wilson, Head of Integrated Payments at Discover Global Network. “In a case like that, I’d advise retailers that when building out their e-commerce platform, make sure they’re connected with an acquirer and/or gateway that specializes in mobile and web payment systems to ensure they’re given as many payment options as possible. Solving for customer pain points can help to keep quality of the checkout experience high, and shopping cart abandonment low.”

Just how often are shopping carts left full without purchase? According to the Baymard Institute, an ecommerce usability research institute, 68.81 percent of online shopping carts are abandoned. The most common reasons? Everything from slow load times and unclear return policies, to a “too-lengthy” checkout process and difficult to find coupon codes[1].

Indeed, “there are many components along the digital shopping journey that are broken and create opportunities for cart abandonment,” says Jordan McKee, senior analyst, mobile payments, at 451 Research. “When solving for cart abandonment, retailers should let simplicity, immediacy and context serve as their guiding principles.”[2]

Invest In Digital Wallets

Time-consuming forms and the requirement to key in payment card credentials create plenty of chances for the prospective buyer to leave the site and perhaps never to return again. Some retailers are addressing this issue by implementing digital wallets that streamline the checkout process and remove elements of friction.

Craig L. Aberle, Publisher of pointsofsale.com, raises a good point.

“If I’m 55 and trying to buy something on my iPhone, can I simply check out with Paypal in one or two clicks, or, must I struggle with my reading glasses and enter a credit card number, address and all kinds of information?” he asks. “That is a real problem for me, as an older consumer. Also, if I am sitting in a public place, and I don’t want to take my credit card out of my wallet—I will not make a purchase. Think about adding Apple Pay, Android Pay, Samsung Pay, or Paypal to your check out page.”

Install a Progress Indicator

Once potential customers have selected their products and placed them in their online shopping cart, they want to know how long the checkout process is and at what stage they are in.

While there are ways to streamline the process—including relying on digital wallets to cut down on the number of steps—a simple way to keep consumers abreast of their progress is to clearly spell it out for them with a progress indicator. This feature highlights the customer’s place in the checkout journey and how many steps there will be until they are finished.

Understand the Importance of Mobile Design

“Many retailers are also losing sales due to their lack of responsive design on mobile sites,” says McKee. “That’s because mobile is becoming the de-facto platform for commerce, yet not all retailers have optimized their e-commerce sites for this transition, creating a poor user experience[3].”

Indeed, perhaps nothing irks a customer more than going to a brand site on their mobile phone and having to pinch and scroll because the site is designed purely for those visiting on a desktop or laptop.

Instead, “forward-thinking retailers should increasingly think mobile-first to ensure they are providing experiences consistent with their shoppers’ browsing behaviors,”[4] he says. This means hiring a web design firm to design your site for use on both a computer and smartphone or tablet.

Rely On Thumbnails to Keep Consumers Interested

With so many opportunities to abandon their carts, providing thumbnails — or small photos about the size of a postage stamp — of a user’s intended purchases throughout the checkout process could be one way to keep them wanting to complete their transaction. Think about it: when you shop in a brick and mortar store, you keep your intended purchases with you. Why would they disappear during the mobile shopping experience?

“E-tailers and retailers should be careful to use smaller sized graphics that load quickly on mobile devices,” says Aberle.

Follow these rules of thumb and you could be spending less time wondering why your customers aren’t hitting “confirm purchase” and more time counting a potential increase in sales.

Tips On How to Solve the Shopping Cart Abandonment Puzzle by Lucy Maher.  Available from <http://paymentweek.com/2016-11-14-tips-on-how-to-solve-the-shopping-cart-abandonment-puzzle-11984/> [Nov 14, 2016]

14 Key Facts on Website Speed and 4 Top Tips When It’s Slow

14 Key Facts on Website Speed and 4 Top Tips When It’s Slow by Rob Petersen.  Available <http://www.business2community.com/web-design/14-key-facts-website-speed-4-top-tips-slow-01701900#bC5Rzk6Xb9TZik9O.97> [Nov 14, 2016]

Website speed has long been recognized as a important factor that impacts search engine rankings. And a top factor in Search Engine Optimization (SEO).

Slow website speed creates a bad user experience, one that may result in visitors not coming back to your website or going to your competition. And that it even more important than search rank because search engines don’t buy products, people do.

Is website speed a concern for your site? If it is, what can you do about it?

Here are 14 key facts on website speed and 4 top fixes when it’s slow.

14 KEY FACTS ON WEBSITE SPEED

  1. 80% of a Web page’s load time is spent downloading the different pieces—parts of the page: images, style sheets, scripts, Flash, etc. (Yahoo!)
  2. 79% of web shoppers who have trouble with website performance say they won’t return to the site again. (KissMetrics)
  3. 73% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that is too slow to load. (Fiverr)
  4. 51% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that crashed, froze, or received an error. (Raven)
  5. 47% of consumers expect a website speed page load in 2 seconds or less. (Innovation Insights)
  6. 44% of them would tell a friend if they had a poor experience shopping online. (GlobalDots)
  7. 40% abandon websites that take more than 3 seconds to load. (KissMetrics)
  8. 38% of mobile internet users say that they’ve encountered a website that wasn’t available. (Shoprocket)
  9. 22% is the average increase in website load speed per year. (Radware)
  10. 18% of mobile users will abandon a website if it doesn’t load in less than 5 seconds. If it takes more than 10 seconds to load, 30% will abandon the site. (KissMetrics)
  11. 5 seconds is the average page load time this year. (Pingdom)
  12. A 1 second delay in page response can result in a 7% reduction in conversions. (eConsultancy)
  13. If an e-commerce site is making $100,000 per day, a 1 second page delay could potentially cost you $2.5 million in lost sales every year. (Amazon)
  14. Users begin to drop off a site when its response time is longer than 2.5 seconds. (Forrester)

4 TOP TIPS WHEN IT’S SLOW

  1. Website hosting: The website hosting provider and technology you choose can have a significant effect on your page load times. Dedicated hosting solutions are preferable over shared hosting so you do not have to worry about other websites on the same server as yours slowing your website down.
  2. Enable browser caching: The first time someone comes to your website, they have to download the HTML document, style sheets, JavaScript files and images before being able to use your page. That may be as many as 30 components and 2.4 seconds. Fortunately, certain website platform like WordPress offer caching plug-ins. They require setup and testing but can be a big help with your website recognizing and quickly processing the many elements it has to.
  3. Optimize images: Oversized images take longer to load, so it’s important that you keep your images as small as possible. Use image editing tools to:
    • Crop your images to the correct size. For instance, if your page is 570 px wide, resize the image to that width.
    • Reduce color depth to the lowest acceptable level.
    • Remove image comments.
  4. Optimize CSS imagery: CSS holds the style requirements for your page. Generally, your website accesses this information in one of two ways: in an external file, which loads before your page renders, and inline, which is inserted in the HTML document itself. When setting up your styles, only use one external CSS style sheet since additional style sheets increase HTTP requests. Two resources to help are:

If website speed is important for you, a good tool to examine website speed for your site is Google PageSpeed Insights. This is a good resource to get started, help understand your website speed and what top tips will be the biggest help if your website speed is slow.

Did this teach you something new about website speed?

14 Key Facts on Website Speed and 4 Top Tips When It’s Slow by Rob Petersen.  Available <http://www.business2community.com/web-design/14-key-facts-website-speed-4-top-tips-slow-01701900#bC5Rzk6Xb9TZik9O.97> [Nov 14, 2016]

 

Useful Tips To Help You Become a Web Designer

Useful Tips To Help You Become a Web Designer by David Meyer.  Available from <http://tech.co/useful-tips-help-become-web-designer-2016-10> [October 23, 2016]

e to technology like Photoshop, jQuery and other related proficiencies, web designers’ skills have become a major concern nowadays. Becoming a leader in web designing arena is not a piece of cake for everybody: The process demands a hands-on grip on every step of the web design. The website designer is familiar with all the newest market trends and strives to bring innovation while developing more productive solution.

Helping people is our primary aim. Thus, this post holds all the useful tips that can help you become a successful web designer, if you manage to master all of them. Let’s proceed with the handy website designer tips:

What You Need To Know

Photoshop

As the most demanded option for the designers, Photoshop has been utilized for many years now. Many expert front-end developers being acquainted with this software program know thoroughly that how to play with it to extract the utmost graphics from the number of PSD files. The execution of different tasks with Photoshop has become simpler and the credit goes to all 3rd party plugins who made it possible.

Start Designing With HTML/CSS Code

The designers acquainted with HTML & CSS code try to initiate designing process in the browser and this is all they do bypassing their Photoshop process. HTML design is needed for the coding. Before you tackle all that, you should know HTML & CSS basics.

CSS Frameworks

Some prominent frameworks like Foundation, Bootstrap, and other related frameworks can help you to attain expected results exact to the imaginations. These credible sources come up with numerous friendly features and advanced programs required to form the applications. Their presence in the web designing realm has proved to be the useful choice for the web designers especially when it comes to constructing applications.

Right Color Utilization

Never go with the copied color scheme which other designers have already used. A lot of research over the web is necessary to build the appreciable color schemes, so take some time and choose the best option to fulfill your project needs.

Go With Responsive

The responsive design or layout is also referred to as media queries, flexible images, and fluid grid. Hence, you must be aware of all these terms and what they actually represent to ensure the decision you have taken is actually right or not. Ultimately, responsive design offers a remarkable compatibility with almost all smart devices, their supported browsers, and platforms without losing the real existence of images or text. This is a needed approach these days to get more and more traffic, so avoiding it may take you closer to the risk.

Promoting Yourself Is Also Imperative

Now, the question is how to promote your business and which mediums will help you easily execute these tasks. We are here to help you know the right ways via this post, wherein we are going to explain a few indispensable yet effective things beneficial to promote yourself globally:

Add Portfolio

Adding this section to the website is exemplary in order to display the successfully accomplished work done in the past or recently. It’s good to show your proficiency across the world. If you haven’t dealt any great work in the past, then also you should continue thinking about it to insure that you are ready for all project handling needs, simple or complex.

Get Ready for Social Media

Social networking sites have a broad network these days. Hence, these are the perfect ways for the seekers to find relevant jobs exact to the expected demands. Regardless of social media platform, it’s better to confirm that the created profile over there is summarized, clean, and attention-grabbing so that viewer can easily impress and contact you soon.

Include Your Potential Clients

Almost all interested clients ask your previously achievements and work that you have successfully delivered. So, prepare a list of your reliable clients and add them to your site so that the new users can understand what kind of work you have completed in your past journey.

Conclusion

In the cutthroat digital world, technology is ever-evolving. Hence, any web designer should be familiar with all the latest changes and strive to learn new ones in order to remain ahead of the pack.

Useful Tips To Help You Become a Web Designer by David Meyer.  Available from <http://tech.co/useful-tips-help-become-web-designer-2016-10> [October 23, 2016]

The Ingredients Of A Successful Mobile App

The Ingredients Of A Successful Mobile App.  Available from <https://techfeatured.com/1766/the-ingredients-of-a-successful-mobile-app> [November 06, 2016; 17:36]

Gone are the days where people used to read and write. The smart phones dominate the life of every other person around the world. These smart phones are powerful in countless ways. Let’s begin by taking a look at all those mobile apps resting in your phone. From cooking to staying healthy, there’s so much you can do through them. Mobile apps have a strong influence in times like these. No, it just doesn’t stop to Candy Crush and Pokemon Go. The mobile apps built in this century are sophisticated and functional like never before. It is tough to stay put with this competition.

If you wish to build an app that runs well in the market, here are some helpful tips for you.

1. Do People Need it?

When you build a mobile app that is the first thing you need to ask yourself. Why is it going to be there in the market in the first place? This will ultimately help you to set your goals right and drive you into the right direction. Is there a void in the market that you intend to fill? It shouldn’t be like any other app in the market. People don’t want to flood their smart phones any longer. When you build an app, it should have a grander purpose and deliver what is not there already.

2. Cross-Platform App

Any mobile application is only beautiful to the users if it appears the same way throughout all the platforms. You know the misery of visiting some websites that completely change its shape on the mobile phone? No one wants to have more of those. You must develop a mobile applications that is functional throughout all the platforms. Haven’t we already seen how terrible the Android users felt because Prisma launched later on Android?

3. It Should be Super Fast

We certainly aren’t patient beings. Let’s not blame us for that. The never ending traffic tests enough of our patience. When it comes to mobile apps, people prefer the ones that are fast and load quickly. No one wishes to wait for it to load and reveal what it has. Most of the times, people wouldn’t wait beyond five seconds for an application to load its pages. Everyone has high expectations when they download an app. Your mobile app should be tested against this and you must ensure it runs fast to survive the competition.

4. Have an Online Presence

Before your mobile applications gets launched in the market, you must have a stronger online presence beforehand. For this reason, a functional and great looking website must be launched before you launch the app in the market. This would help you to promote the application on your own platform and help people to create a stronger brand identity. A major concern of a lot of users is fakeness of mobile apps. Your website will eliminate those fears completely.

The Ingredients Of A Successful Mobile App.  Available from <https://techfeatured.com/1766/the-ingredients-of-a-successful-mobile-app> [November 06, 2016; 17:36]