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The Importance of Layout to the Success of an Online Business

Written by: John McEntyre

Article Overview: First impression is the best impression and this is very true in the case of online business too. I have come across many onsite business owners complaining that their website is not delivering the expected results in spite of employing good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods.

The Importance of Layout to the Success of an Online Business

Experienced online marketing companies and web design companies know how much a well designed layout is important to the success of an online business. Let us assume that your website is like a virtual office or a virtual showroom and the home page is your reception desk. Isn’t it important to have a well maintained and tastefully done reception with pleasant and courteous reception staff to greet your customers? First impression is the best impression and this is very true in the case of online business too. I have come across many onsite business owners complaining that their website is not delivering the expected results in spite of employing good Search Engine Optimization (SEO) methods. They complain that even though the traffic generated is satisfactory, the visitors to their websites don’t hang on, they just vanish. This is like so near and yet so far because on the internet you are only a click away from your competition.

I wanted to find out why customers don’t enter these sites even after the search engines brought them to the websites. The answer was staring right at my face when I clicked on the websites. The home page layout was boring, dull, colorless and confusing. The links were cluttered and the whole structure of the home page was in one word, uninteresting. This was the reason why most of the customers didn’t want to enter the site. Subconsciously they got repulsed at the way the site looked and went searching for more attractive sites. I solved the problem by entirely restructuring the layouts of their websites by adding colors, and graphics to emphasize the areas we wanted the visitor to notice. I also placed the links in such a way that it was easy for the visitors to navigate and enter. The results were amazing. These online businesses made dramatic turnarounds and their conversion rates increased significantly.

My years of experience in the online marketing industry have made me understand one important aspect of website designing and that is; no matter how good a website is in luring visitors, without a good inviting homepage layout all the potential customers are going to simply walk away. A home page is the critical point where a potential customer can get an instant idea of what he or she can expect to get from the website. This is precisely why I always make it a point to spend some quality time just on the layout alone. Adding and mixing the right colors, graphics and easy navigational links are a top priority for me.

There are plenty of statistics that prove beyond a doubt that a proper layout contributes immensely to the success of an online business. Anyone with a thorough knowledge of how an online business works and has helped online businesses taste success by providing good web designs will endorse my views. My formula for developing layouts for websites is to keep the design simple yet attractive. My practice is not to provide everything on the home page itself but to place easily identifiable navigational links that are easy to use for the customer. The trick is in helping the customer find his way into the site and the more time he or she spends on the site, the more chances of the prospect converting to a sale. I select graphics that have a role to play and a message to convey rather than cluttering up the site with graphics that are added for effect and nothing else. Color schemes are chosen with a purpose. The purpose is to get the attention of the target customers and retain it.

Given the fact that visual appeal increases the chances of success and we humans process visuals around 60,000 times faster than other forms of communication and also the fact that most of what we learn is through our eyes, don’t you think it is necessary to have images, color and graphics on the website layout that are pleasing to the human eye?

Your website is far too important to leave to inexperienced designers, hiring a competent online marketing company can not only bring the right visitors to your website, but they can re-design the site to appeal to those visitors in ways that will vastly improve the performance of converting visitors to customers.

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Article Tags: business owners, colors, conversion rates, first impression, home page layout, layouts, marketing companies, marketing industry, optimization seo, reception desk, reception staff, rsquo, search engine optimization, search engines, spite, traffic, turnarounds, virtual office, virtual showroom, web design companies



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