making website visitors feel welcome
Ever been to a website that took forever to load? Or one that made you search through page after page just to find a phone number or an email address? How about a site that started playing music without giving you a choice – and while you were in your office or cubicle?!
Experiences like this can drive your traffic and potential customers away. Making your website user-friendly is well worth the thought and effort as you go about developing your site. Here are some quick tips to get the thought process going.
Users like websites that (are):
quick to load: You have about 5 to 7 seconds before your readers decide whether or not they want to stay on your site to find out more about you. Graphics and images add visual interest and appeal, but they take more time than text does to load, so make sure your images are optimized for your customers. If your target customer base lives in remote areas where only dial-up is available, keep your images to the absolute minimum and stick to well-designed type (text and fonts) to get your message across.
accommodate their style: Different customers have different styles of shopping or doing business. Many want to do everything online and if your business lends itself to that, enable your customers to serve themselves by providing enough information. Others prefer to speak to a live person. Make it easy for those buyers to contact you – put your phone number or email up on every page and where it can be found most easily.
easy to understand: You might be an expert on your industry, but chances are your customers aren’t. Make it easy for them to understand what you do or sell by using common terms rather than industry jargon.
easy to navigate: Give your site a consistent look and feel – put your navigation in the same place on every page and don’t get too cute with it. Those fly-out and drop down menus are slick, but if they require too much hand-eye coordination to select the right page or if they cover up other important information when they are opened up, you’ll risk sending away a potential customer.
understands their lack of time: As brilliant and on point as your writing is, don’t expect your customers to read every word of it to get your message. State your point in the first sentence. Use headings to direct customers to content they might find interesting.
to sum it up …
Look at your website from your customer’s viewpoint and you’ll stand a better chance at turning that prospect into a sale!
Tags: content, copy writing, user-friendly