When someone visits your website, he has some high expectations. Unless you’re offering something he absolutely can’t get elsewhere, he expects your site to be easy to use — and if it isn’t, he’ll go elsewhere. In such a situation, you’re left with visitors who aren’t particularly Web savvy and may or may not buy through your site. To make things worse, users are getting more Web savvy every year.
Your website simply can’t afford to suck. You have to more than meet visitors needs from the moment they land on your site. Most websites simply don’t reach that level, as Andy Hayes and Kelly Erickson point out in Why Your Website Sucks (and How to Fix It).
The ebook is a down and dirty guide to Web usability, meant originally for travel and tourism businesses. However, it’s full of concrete tips that work just as well for any other small business owner — especially if you don’t have time to learn all the details of Web usability, but you’ve got to make the changes to your website yourself.
Having an easy-to-use website isn’t just a matter of Web traffic. After all, there’s no reason to have visitors on your website if you can’t get them to buy anything. In their ebook, Hayes and Erickson don’t focus on usability for the sake of usability — which some other authors are notorious for. Rather, they focus on getting your website up to standards so that it can convert visitors to buyers as fast as possible. They walk through tricky topics like the buying cycle and show how a better website can take advantage of the process that almost every buyer goes through before sending in their money.
A good website convinces visitors to stick around after only three seconds (that’s how long it takes most visitors to bounce and go back to Google to look for something else). That’s all the time you have to impress a visitor enough to keep him on your site. Not every little detail has to be perfect — after all, how much will a visitor see in the first three seconds? — but you have to offer a solid first impression.
There is a lot of low-hanging fruit that a small business owner can go after, in terms of improving a website to the point that visitors actually stick around for a little while. The key is to find those potential changes and get them made. Unless you have a lot of time on your hands to learn the details of usability, a guide is indispensable.
If you’re at all concerned about the idea of paying $37.99 for an ebook, Hayes and Erickson have made a free chapter available to let you check out the guide before putting your money down. They’ve also upped the ante by adding a workbook and a recorded call with expert Naomi Dunford.
Google+Web.com is now offering forums designed to support small businesses in cities throughout the US. Learn more about these forums here: http://Businessforum.web.com/
Tags: Web Design
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