Web Design Tips and Tricks

Got Web Traffic but Still Low Sales? Ten Ways to Selling Success - Part 2

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Part one of this article is available at www.bookcoaching.com/freearticles/article-34.shtml.

Have you put a lot of effort, time, and money into your site and are frustrated with lackluster sales? Are you planning to put a new Web site and don't know where to start?

If you are like many business professionals out there, you know your subject, you are an expert speaker or coach in your field, and you are even passionate about it. You have great products and services to sell.

But do you translate those into benefit-driven headlines that pull sales? If you have already put your Web site up did you address your purpose? Do you want to inform, communicate, and help? That's fine, but if you want to sell something, you will drive your potential customers away with such non-effective phrases as "welcome to my site," Here's by product " long paragraphs of your bio on the home page, your book's introduction, or "subscribe to my ezine."

You have only 10 seconds to impress your Web visitors. They don't care about anything except what you can do for them.

Give them a reason to buy.

It's never too late to refresh your home page and others with "marketing pizzazz." Your home page deserves time, effort, and money. You will need to edit it several times before landing on just the right phrases. Without these and continuous maintenance, your unguided efforts are wasted.

Instead, write compelling, emotional, benefit-driven copy to inspire people to take out their credit cards to buy your unique, wonderful creations. You can when you apply the following power "Marketing Pizzazz" techniques.

6. Make your layout clear, clean, and consistent. You need to organize each page in the same lay out—such as left centered, right centered, or centered. If you mix designs, your would-be client or buyer will think you unprofessional. Go to other Web sites and choose a design that resonates with you. Keep every page in the same format.

7. Use color, font changes, and small graphics to spice up your site, but remember to use a lot of white space. Too many large graphics make your site load slowly, and your visitors will leave before seeing how you can help them. Without easy-to-read copy and clear navigation they will also disappear. Remember the "10 second" rule.

If you are like me, and have a content-dense site, it's OK to include long copy as long as you divide it into bite-size pieces with plenty of headlines. A good idea is to ask your friends and associates to visit your site to report glitches and feedback. What turns them on or off? They often see what the creator is too close to see. Of course, give them a reward for helping you, such as a free report.

8. Put your information in short paragraphs. Visitors love free content, but when they see a long line of print, they get discouraged because they want their information fast, clear, and concise. Make each paragraph only 4-6 lines. Online readers want easy-to- read material they can get the main points from, and they want it faster than light rays.

9. Be consistent with your headlines and body fonts. Do not use all capital letters in your articles or headlines, unless you use a few words for emphasis, such as "FACT," or "TRUE," because they are hard to read. Do not use the same font for headlines and titles as you do for the body of information beneath. This mistake makes it hard to distinguish the two.

If you are a non-techie like myself, you can use primarily two fonts:

"Times Roman" for headings, and "Arial" for the body. Notice the no tails in Arial (called sans serif), good for short copy.

In your book, you'll reverse the above font uses. Use "Times Roman" for the copy and "Arial" for titles and headlines.

10. Use dividers such as ======, or ++++++ when you change topics. These can add variety and help your visitor to see your message more clearly. These are often used on business ezines. Each publisher makes their ezine their own by their personal choices.

Remember your home page must give your visitors a reason to buy. Use these "Marketing Pizzazz" techniques throughout your site. Think right now, what is it I need to act on next to manifest more dollar success on my site?

This post comes a bit late in the whole web 2.0 cycle. I feel that it bears repeating because I have come across sites that don't follow some basic principles when pulling in 3rd party data from sites such as flickr, twitter et. al.

APIs and data portability

The blessing of popular and easy to use APIs and the data portability of web 2.0 applications has had an unfortunate side effect, and that is that some implementations that use these services do not integrate appropriate contingency design should these 3rd party services fail.

Caching data calls to APIs is a good bit of contingency design. Many APIs will require caching - like that of Amazon - but I suspect this is intended to help limit resource use of the API host, not the site using the API. The reasons a person using API accessed data on their website would want to cache the data are:

1. To speed up the load time of their website
2. To have a back up plan if the API call fails

A simple implementation to handle those two cases would be one that caches an API call for a given amount of time and one that freshens stale cached data and triggers an error should an API call fail.

Caching is good contingency design practice

As I said above, this post is a bit late to the party but it is worth writing as recently I have come upon at least three sites where firebug and other widgets have revealed issues retrieving API fetched data and the site loading times have been horrible.

A decent implementation idea would be to roll your own caching wrapper and agnostically plug it in to a stable caching tool, perhaps something like Cache Lite for PHP. In this manner you have a reusable, caching library independent piece of code that can handle caching/flushing and refreshing of data which could function to handle the two cases discussed above.

And that's it. It's been 541 days since my last post. Wow. I hope this is a re-start of a new phase of blogging. Right, and it looks like I had not built the commenting functionality into this version of the site. What a surprise. I'd still like feedback so if anyone has any email me at mike at this domain and I'll pop a comment right into the database. Off to build some commenting functionality... Comments should be working now.

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