Seven Sure Fire Ways to Scare Your Customers AwayWritten by Daniel Barnett
Your visitors are your most important Internet asset. Without visitors, you don't have buyers, and without buyers you don't have a business.But visitors are a fickle beast. Somewhat like a cautious mouse - always sniffing and nosing about, but at first sign of trouble off they scamper. Your web site could be littered with tiny little signs that are causing hundreds of visitors a week to simply close their browser window on you. At first sign that you are untrustworthy your visitor will be clicking off elsewhere. This could be costing you a serious loss of revenue. 1) Hype and Over Sell Don't hype it up Too Much. Always keep to an appropriate tone, always keep it believable. If it becomes over-hyped, people will soon dismiss your venture, and there goes your customer. 2) Avoid mis-typez, spelling errors and sloppy grammar. These are all potential signs that your product is also shabbily put together. If you haven't taken time with your web site, who's to say that you have taken time developing your product? 3) Missing Elements. Missing graphics and dead links give impression that you might be going out of business, or that you don't care. It looks like your site hasn't been maintained…and if this is case, your customer is immediately going to be concerned about product and after sales service. 4) Last Updated July 1997. Never put a text line on your pages that says "last updated xx July 1997". This will always give impression that your site is old…even if it was updated two weeks ago. If you carelessly forget to update that line (it happens) visitors may not bother to look any further because they think that it is dated information. Worse still visitors may believe that you are out of business because it has been so long since you changed content.
| | WHAT'S THE QUALITY OF YOUR WEB SITE? Written by Miles J. Nixon
A good web site receives thousands of visitors a day. But how many of those turn into customers? People sign-up or buy when they feel comfortable with a web site. If it's down, slow, or broken in any way, visitor will usually be uncomfortable and go elsewhere. Why? Well, do you like to shop in a retail store that is missing products, has no customer service, or you can't navigate? Probably not. Many web sites have equivalent of these situations, only they are represented to visitors as problems with site. Remember your web site does talking for you and visitors make judgments strictly on their experience at your site. When things do work way they should work, sign-up or checkout process is simple, product or service is not confusing, and whole experience feels right - result is customers. If this is ultimate goal, corporate web site managers and web site owners must treat their web site with same care they would a physical store or office. In virtual world we don't have store managers, but we do have a relatively new emerging business category: online monitoring. Online monitoring services mind site/store and make sure it's open and ready to do business 24 hours a day, every day. These services can watch site performance, content, availability/reliability, and security. They can also provide site managers with immediate notification of problems via alerts. By watching a site from outside firewall and not inside, online monitoring services identify problems that cannot be immediately seen from inside.
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