Web Design Tips and Tricks

How To Get A Pay Raise From Your Web Site

Get Web Design Tips and Tricks on mps-web-design.com. How To Get A Pay Raise From Your Web Site topic will increase your understanding on Web Design Tips and Tricks. We at mps-web-design.com only provide news, articles, information in Web Design Tips and Tricks. Web Design Tips and Tricks at mps-web-design.com provides the most up to date news and articles. If you have questions please do not hesitate to contact us.

How many of the visitors to your web site take the action you want them to take? Whether you want them to buy something from you, sign up for your newsletter, enter your sweepstakes, or give you contact information to follow up on, you want them to do something. The percentage of visitors who actually do that something is called your “conversion rate.”

Many web site owners are great marketers. They know how to drive a ton of traffic to their site. When the results are less than what they had hoped for, they think the answer is to spend more time and money generating even greater traffic.

What they really need to be doing is improving their conversion rate.

Picture this: If you currently get one sale (or subscription, etc) for every 100 visitors to your site, you have a conversion rate of 1%. But what if I told you that by making a few changes to your site you could increase that to two sales per 100, and double your income without increasing your traffic?

The best part is that most often simple changes are all that are needed. Once you make those changes, you can forever “convert” a greater number of visitors without doing anything else different. So, without further ado, here are three changes you can make that will have the greatest likely impact on your conversion rate:

1. Make it easy on your visitor. She is there for information, and if you make it hard for her to get to it, she will leave. Don’t make her sit through a flash movie. Don’t make her click to another page. Don’t make your page so busy she can’t find what she’s looking for. Instead, treat her to a clean, fast loading page that guides her straight to the action you want her to take and lets her take it.

2. Make your copy persuasive. The words on your page are the most important, and most often overlooked, element in the conversion process. It is what you say to your visitor that will convince her to become your customer. Make those words as powerfully persuasive, benefit laden, and emotionally charged as you possibly can. Sell her on the action you want her to take.

3. Reverse the risk. People are nervous about buying online, or giving out their personal information. State your privacy policy right beside your subscription form. Spell out your money-back guarantee in your product description. Take all the risk away from what you want your visitor to do and she will be more likely to do it.

Making these simple changes can do wonders for your conversion rate. Once you have them in place, you can start enjoying your raise!

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.

More Articles: