The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below.

Low Cost Web Site Design Secret Number Four: Making Your Web Site “Usable”

How usable is your site? To find out, first you need to know what usability is.

Usability assesses how easy user interfaces are as far as the functionality of your site. But it’s not just about making sure everything on the site works. You also want to be able to determine:

• how quickly visitors can use your site, and
• how easily visitors are able to make use of it

This should be the top priority in design because if a product is not usable, your visitors won’t respond to it. How useful a site is has a direct relationship to how profitable a site is, therefore usability should be top in your list of priorities for your site.

In a recent usability study of 9 top Web sites, most of some 70 test users could not find specific information they were instructed to find a majority of the time.

So how can you make your site usable?

A site will be generally usable if the content is relevant, easy to find, the web page is pleasant to look at and well designed. Web sites should be designed with the customers’ needs in mind - not the Web site owner’s needs. A site with good content, regardless of its subject, is one that provides information that is beneficial to users.

Clear and simple navigation that is consistent and does not confuse visitors contributes to making information easy to find. A good navigation system should answer the following questions:
1. Where am I?
2. Where have I been?
3. Where can I go?

Having clear text links on your site also helps in ease of use. We’ll pick up next time with common usability mistakes and ways to avoid them.

Nina

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The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below - look at the bottom of each post for the link to all posts.

Low Cost Web Design Secret Number Three: How Web Design Can Factor Into Your Traffic Goals.

When you know what the function of your site is, you can use share that goal with your web designer, and get better results out of your design project. For example, if someone comes to me and tells me they want a standard ecommerce site, I am focused on particular things, to make it easier for a person who comes to that site to make a purchase, following a logical progression to a sale.

But if a person wants to be able to capture a lead before the new visitor is free to roam about the site, the design of the site is quite different.

Then we go back to the question of traffic. A site with a clear goal in mind can be designed to take advantage of that goal. As a result, fewer visitors result in more sales.

If your goal was not clear when you had your site created, it may take more visitors to a site in order for sales to happen.

Once you have determined what you want your site to achieve, all you need to do is make your goals measurable and realistic. For example, if you get 5000 visitors per month and aim at converting 2% of these visitors into clients, then your Website goal can be as little as 100 new targeted prospects per month to double your sales.

The difference is that those 100 visitors will visit a more targeted site, and convert to sales at double the rate.

Remember that the next time you hire a web site designer.

Nina

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The Low Cost Web site Design Secrets series continues. You’ll always be able to click the link to the entire series below - look at the bottom of each post for the link to all posts.

Low Cost Web Design Secret Number Two: Raw Traffic Numbers are Misleading. Base Your Traffic Goals on Sales

One million visitors to your site every month would be grand if all one million of those people were to take your most desired action. However, on the Internet, this is almost never the case. In fact, there isn’t a single documented case of a site getting one million visitors in the space of a month and having all one million of those visitors make a purchase on their first visitors.

Now you know something your competitor doesn’t - the number of people who come to your site, in and of itself, is not the meaningful number. Here’s another thing that should be wide knowledge and isn’t - the number that matters, in terms of traffic, is the conversion rate.

What’s a conversion rate? That’s the number of people who visit your site, divided by the number of people who take action, or convert from visitor to member, subscriber, or buyer, depending on the situation. The average rate of conversion online is 1%, but there are ways to get that number higher.

Now, let’s see if you’re getting this concept. Think about the following question - is it better to have 5000 visitors a day to your ecommerce site who just browse your site, or 50 visitors a day who subscribe that day, and make a purchase later on that month, given the average rate of conversion online?

It’s a trick question. 1% of 5000 visitors is still 50 people.

But what if your conversion to subscribers was 30% and 90% of them resulted in a sale that month? You’d be able to make a lot more revenue, with a lot less traffic.

When you design your site, your goal should be to transform a few targeted visitors into sales, not to hope for a few sales from a sheer volume of visitors. Proper web design can help you reach that goal. We’ll talk more about this in the next installment.

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