7/7/08

Is Your Website Design Driving Away Your Customers?

SBI! Traffic TestAt the early days of Internet, marketer have determined that an ecomerce website must strive to reach at least 5 specific goals:

1. Appeal to a global market
2. Operate 24 hours a day, 7 days a week
3. Instantly deliver its products and/or services
4. Automate its back-end process
5. Work within a simple interface

Even if these goals are quite broad in scope, their essentials are what give a marketing website the complete focus and direction that it needs to be successful. 

Some of those essentials include setting up a secure ordering system, providing customer support, advertising and marketing. However regardless of its level of detail; each goal of a business website must always address the needs of its target audience.

Unfortunately, many online business owners are making the same mistake over and over again, they address the needs of their business instead of the needs of their customers or potential customers, and this is but one contributor of the difficulty we all have come to experience on the Internet and of course, one contributor to failure.

Audience-Oriented Marketing website Design Goals


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Give your website a professional look! But, it's more than that. A professional ecommerce website must work on multiple browsers, it must be fast, and it must offer to your readers modern functionality.

Your customers and potential customers deal with things like Internet knowledge, connection speeds, browser type, and screen resolution. So, you have to take in consideration all these elements when creating your marketing website.

For example, if your targeted market have little or no Internet experience your business website should provide a very simple interface with small blurbs of useful text next to each button or link. The main goal here is to offer extensive help.

A marketing website that serves mostly Internet Explorer users can take advantage of advanced Java or VB scripting, while a website that attracts mostly low-end browser users should avoid scripting altogether and concentrate on providing text-based content instead.

Another goal of a business website that caters to visitors with slow Internet connections would be to display small, fast loading graphics rather than video-laden web pages that are riddled with 400K+ images.

These examples demonstrate how a website's audience literally dictates what should and shouldn't be part of its design if it's going to meet its audience-oriented business goals.

Sometimes, audience-oriented design goals may conflict with each other especially when they encounter visitors who have fast Internet connections but low screen resolutions. To accomplish website design goals for such a widely varied audience, it's best to design a website that satisfies the most common needs.

You can determine what your visitors needs are, by checking your server's visitor logs or your website stat counter to find the most commonly used browser, Internet connection speed, screen resolution and more.

Without these logs and and/or statistics, your guess will be as good as any stranger's.

Click here to go to this great FREE service that will analyze your website's load time at various connection speeds with various browsers. Use it to see if your website accommodates the needs of your visitors Internet equipment.

Want to learn how to create a professional website-design that sells? Click here to dowload this FREE ebook and thank me later.




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1 comment:

  1. Nice article. I agree with most all of these points.

    ReplyDelete

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