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Web Design & Conversion

Written by: Adam Lotz

Article Overview: One of the most important yardsticks to measure the success of any web-based venture is its online conversion rate. Getting people to your site is all good and well, but the real measure of your website’s design and content is whether you are able to turn the casual browser into a paying customer.

Web Design & Conversion

One of the most important yardsticks to measure the success of any web-based venture is its online conversion rate. Getting people to your site is all good and well, but the real measure of your website’s design and content is whether you are able to turn the casual browser into a paying customer.

Those who endeavour to increase conversion and do research on the topic will find a slew of online references that tout everything from eye-tracking to hover-to-click-ratio as the ultimate answer to conversion-related worries. Sifting through this heap of information can be confusing and frustrating to say the least. So, before you throw out the baby with the proverbial bathwater and shell out your hard-earned cash for a complete website redesign, we recommend that you take a good, hard look at your current website to see if there are simple adjustments you can make.

Ask yourself: where do I lose my customer? At which point along the browsing-to-purchase timeline does my potential customer become so frustrated/disinterested that they abandon their shopping cart rather than proceeding to the checkout point? The very first thing you should be looking at is your Call to Action buttons. When you look at these buttons there are two very important questions you should be asking yourself:

1. When a visitor clicks on this link, what exactly will they see next?

2. Will what they see encourage/discourage them to take the action I want them to take (i.e. make a purchase)?

Here are a few examples of buttons that will have your potential customer heading for the hills:

• The ‘empty cart' button. How often have you filled your real life shopping cart with groceries only to be tackled by a store assistant who grabs the contents of your cart and puts it back on the shelves? Never? Well, why then do we assume that putting an ‘empty cart' (identical in every conceivable way to the ‘place order' or ‘proceed to checkout' button) next to the button we really want the customer to click is a good idea? Time is money, and if you waste your customers' they will take their business elsewhere.

• The completely irrelevant link. A good example of an irrelevant link is the distracting (and actually extremely irritating) banner advertisements that some sites put on their shopping cart pages. You have just gotten your potential customer to the very place you wanted them from the start, why break their concentration now?

• The ‘reset form' button. How many times have you gone through the time-consuming rigmarole of filling out an online form with all your personal details only to find that you have accidentally filled out those of your deceased grandmother? If indeed you have you will be one of very few people on the planet who have found the ‘reset form' button useful. Placing this button next to a ‘submit application' button has the potential to cause confusion, evoke swearing and even lose you a customer.

These are just some of the simple mistakes that website owners make every day. There are a myriad more. Why not contact us and set up a meeting so we may discuss the easiest way of improving your online conversion rate?

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Article Tags: action buttons, bathwater, br, cart button, casual browser, checkout, conversion rate, empty cart, endeavour, grabs, groceries, heap, shell out, shelves, shopping cart, sifting through, slew, ul, worries, yardsticks



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