What does your website say about your business? Can everyone see what you are selling in the first few seconds they arrive at your site or do they have to search around to find what they are looking for? Do people go to your site and wonder if they went to the right place? There are many things you can do to get people to stick around your site and find what they are looking for instead of going to a competitor. This article will help with the general setting up of your website, how should it look, what should and shouldn’t go on it (specifically the home page), and how your products and information are presented.

Setting the mood

Picking your colors.

First of all you need to set a mood for your website. Different colors portray different feelings. Lets say you own a furniture website, you may want some neutral tones, similar to the colors of the furniture you are selling. There are a few websites like COLOURlovers or kuler among others that help you pick color schemes.

Picking your font.

Ok, so lets say your are selling high quality office furniture. You are not going to use a grungy font or a fun/silly font. You would lean towards a professional font to correspond to the type of person that would buy your product. A well chosen font can do wonders for your website, or any design in general.

Setting up your product.

You want to think out of the box, get some interesting photos to display your products. With that said, you aren’t going to go put your office furniture outside near some railroad tracks with a model with tattoos and lots of earrings, nose rings, lip rings…you get the point. You would want to show something like a photo of a big comfy couch wrapped in someone’s living room or someone sitting at their cherry desk in their massive library (depending on what kind of furniture you are selling). The first thing people want to see when they come to your website are the products, and how it can fit into their life. If you don’t have the budget for a photo shoot, look at websites like iStockphoto. You can get some great photos at really good prices.

Let your visitors find your products easily

Make it easy for your customers.

You may have all your information about who you are and about your products displayed for your visitors, but they don’t know what you are trying to sell/promote. People are not going to dig through information just to see if there might be something there they are looking for. The easier it is for a visitor to find the information they want, the less likely they will go somewhere else.

Displaying your products.

Visitors want to see what is going on, not read it (they will eventually, but they want to see what they are looking for first). For this reason you should visually display what you are selling or promoting. Depending on what you are selling you should think of your home page as your showroom floor or, showcase. Show off your best stuff accurately, so when people do come into your place of business they can find what they are looking for.

There are always cases where showing products isn’t possible, a good example is if you are a designer or anyone else that sells services, it is kind of hard to show your products. In that case you can show what you have done, like a portfolio or take pictures of things you have done previously.

Guide your visitors.

They know what you sell, now what? You need to guide your visitors through your website. Remember though, guide, don’t force. Give your customers options, but lets say you are having a sale, the sale should be your prominent selling point for your website and people will want to click on that. There is a general layout for selling products that you can see on websites like Best Buy or Applebee’s for example. You have a main photo for the important products you are selling like a big sale for example. Then below it you have some sub-photos that are secondary. These secondary photos could be something like clearance items, free shipping, gift cards, anything that you want your visitors to see that will catch their attention. This gives your visitors options but at the same time you are saying “hey click on this one.” And obviously you would have your regular navigation so if someone is looking for something specific they can go and find it.

Give them a reason to come back

Sales, Promotions & Events

Ok, so you have your visitors interested. Now we have to give them a reason to keep coming back. I’m sure you are going to have different things going on at your place of business, right? Well if you do, show the customers. If they know they can go to your website to find good deals, sales, events, promotions, etc., they will keep coming back.

Inform, inform, inform!

People check back at websites because they look for new information. What better way to do that than with a blog. To keep the furniture example going, add a blog to your website, talking about how to care for a new leather couch. After all, if you are selling these products, you are the professional. If someone comes into the store and ask you a question about their furniture, put it in your blog. Once you have regular visitors you can also promote your sales, promotions and events. There are many websites out there that offer free blogs, like Wordpress or Blogger. They have many different themes for you to choose from so you can have it match your website closely.

Don’t let them forget you.

They bought that couch from you, now its over. I don’t think so, have them sign up for a newsletter right on your site. Offer incentives like special coupons that come in the newsletter. This is a great way to promote your sales, blog posts and any other information to pass along. This is a great way to make sure your customers don’t forget you because they will be getting an email from you every month or so. There is a great site called Mail Chimp where you can setup a newsletter campaign that gives you email templates to send out.

This is no set way of thinking, there are different things to do to reach out to your visitors. The main thing to do is to give your visitors what they want. People will only look at your site for a limited amount of time, so use that time wisely to show people what you are all about and show them what they are looking for.

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