How To Make Your Customers Accept All ChargesWritten by Akinori Furukoshi
Are There Any Hidden Charges?A while ago, there were junk-mail ads offering products with incredible prices. They also, however, charged incredible shipping and handling fees. So it turns out those were actually bad deals. How about your site? Are you hiding any fees? Products or services are well presented on most web sites, but not all charges are presented well. This prevents potential sales from closing. --Don't Give Customers a Surprise-- Here's a simple example. A potential customer, Mr. Smith, visits your web site and picks a product. Your site instructs him to "proceed to checkout" when he's made his choices. He types in his name and shipping information, and total charges appear on screen. Now, suddenly, extra shipping and handling charges appear. Those charges are reasonable, but he wasn't aware of them when he began checkout process. It's a total surprise. Customers don't like this type of surprise! --Don't Hide Extra Charges-- Okay, so maybe today's Internet shoppers are expecting shipping charges. Now your customer is trying to find out what those shipping charges will be. A good way to annoy a shopper is to make it more difficult to find out about shipping charges than it is to choose a product from thousands of products on same web site. After looking around a while, they may finally figure out that only way to determine charges is to go though checkout process. Just before giving his credit card number, Mr. Smith (from example above) will finally view shipping charges. You could have saved him a lot of time and aggravation by telling him this in beginning. Of course it could be even worse. You could ask for his credit card number before showing total charges. But surely you're aware that, in this security-conscious era, no one will give out credit information until total charges are revealed, right?
| | 3 Questions Everyone Should Ask Themselves Before Designing or Redesigning a WebpageWritten by Colin Eyo
With web design tools becoming easier and easier to use, almost anyone with an idea can create their own website. In many cases, individuals who design without professional guidance miss key elements, which compromise effectiveness of their webpage. In order to help understand some of these mistakes being made by novice designers, we will dissect current redesign of http://www.profitmaker.net and discuss some of major questions that should be asked before creating or redesigning any webpage.What is focus? This is most important question to ask yourself before you begin any project. In case of www.profitmaker.net, main purpose of site was to promote client's downloadable book. The original design failed to accomplish this. Not only was book difficult to find, it wasn't even mentioned on main page! See for yourself: http://www.profitmaker.net/old_site/index.htm In order to ensure downloadable book can be easily accessed by a visitor, two links were created on main page to lead prospects directly to download page. If link in header doesn't draw attention of prospect, large graphic of book in center of page definitely will. Also, eye-catching text, designed to promote benefits of product, accompanies each link leading to book's download page. This gives prospect yet another reason to download book. http://www.profitmaker.net Does your design achieve continuity? A simple way to diagnose this problem is to ask "Do all elements in webpage look like they belong together?" The original design of profitmaker.net had two major problems in this department. The choice of graphics for navigation and choice of fonts were throwing off overall unity of page design. When it comes to establishing continuity within a webpage, there is no better guide than simplicity. For navigation and overall graphics, a simple color pallet was chosen consisting mainly of green as primary color and yellow as a secondary. Sticking to this color pallet ensures that we avoid introduction of colors that may clash with rest of design. Also, font choices play a major role in achieving overall flow within main page of site. Again, simple is way to go. Only one major font was chosen for redesign. This makes it easier to establish font hierarchy, allowing clear interpretation of differences between headlines and body text.
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