As we look back at another year, and forward to another, there’s time to reflect on how our websites performed in
last year and decide on what improvements need to be made for New Year ahead. This is first part of a two-part article that looks at 10 things that a website owner can do to improve their websites for New Year.
Did your site perform as well as it could have in 2004?
If you own an ecommerce store, did it receive as many orders as you’d have liked during festive period? Did you get lots of support requests asking for further information? Did your site suffer from a high abandonment rate? We all need our sites to be successful and produce a return on investment on cost of promotion and advertising. However, it’s easy to be taken in by technology and miss basics that will help improve performance of your website, decrease abandonment and increase conversion.
The list below identifies 10 ways in which you can improve your website. All of improvements can be made without major investment, new technology or need for additional resources:
- 1. Ensure that you make your USP/benefits clear on every page
- 2. Ensure that provide improved ways in which your visitors can contact you
- 3. Improve quality of information on your site such that they can make informed purchasing decisions
- 4. Ensure that your site is accessible to all visitors and search engines
- 5. Add new ways of delivering content to 3rd parties
- 6. Improve conversion through removing unnecessary registration and requests for too much information
- 7. Offer greater customer service through not only meeting ecommerce regulations but surpassing them
- 8. Improve site such that it offers an improved user-experience
- 9. Stop worrying about page rank and start focusing on customers
- 10. Take time to understand how visitors use your site and learn from that knowledge
1. Ensure that you make your USP/benefits clear on every page
The Internet breaks down many boundaries. Not only has Internet made it possible for everyone to trade online, but it has also removed geographical barriers making it far easy to purchase products from overseas. However, as an ecommerce site owner, this leads to increased competition. In high-street, you may have had a handful of competitors. Now, you may have hundreds or thousands. Therefore, it’s necessary to stand out from crowd and clearly identify your business and websites USPs and benefits. These may be:
- Price
- Product quality
- Service quality
- Product knowledge
- Product uniqueness
- Product availability
- Free delivery
No matter what your USPs are, make sure that they are clearly identified on your website and make sure that these USPs are visitor-focused by asking yourself question, how does USP benefit visitor.
2. Ensure that provide improved ways in which your visitors can contact you
Visitors are bound to have questions regarding products/services that you provide as well as about your business. In order to assist visitors make informed decisions, it’s important that you provide answers to these questions on your site. There are a number of ways of doing this. These include :
- Frequently asked questions – as you receive new questions from visitors, ensure that you add them to your FAQ
- About us information
- Improved product information
However, it’s clearly not always possible to pre-empt full range of questions a visitor may ask. Therefore, make sure that you make it easy for visitors to contact you if they have questions. Also, ensure that these ways of communicating with you are clearly identified on your website by locating them in header area of each page. Popular means of allowing visitors to contact you include:
- Email
- Telephone – clearly identify hours that you can be contacted
- Contact us form – an improvement on email as you can direct visitors to include information to enable you to be able to provide an improved service
- Live Help – only provide live help if you are able to support it full time
- Call me – make it easier by calling visitors back at a mutually convenient time
- VoIP (e.g. Skype or Vonage) – save money by using Internet telephony
- Ticket-based support
- Forums
3. Improve quality of information on your site such that they can make informed purchasing decisions
