Successful selling online requires a website that is visually attractive as well as easy to use. Here are some tips for developing a website that looks good and is easy to read by visitors.

Make it readable

Visual appeal is nice, but readability must be a top design priority. In order for your content to communicate effectively you need to consider how colours and fonts work on a webpage.

• The text/type should sit comfortably on the background colour. It’s more than an issue of high contrast. White type on a black background is readable on screen, but printed pages will simply appear blank!
• Refrain from choosing busy, loud backgrounds, for example, marble or pattern backgrounds. They detract from content and often make text illegible.
• Too many colours or fonts can also be distracting and give the site a cluttered feel. A few colours are all that is necessary.
• Consider breaking up longer pieces of text with subheadings and bullet points. They encourage continued reading by separating the text into short, bite-sized chunks.
• Use one design throughout the site. It’s confusing if pages within a site are not consistent in design.

Make the pages easy to view

Visitors do not like to scroll from left to right to see the entirety of a webpage so build it to fit the standard monitor size of 640 by 480 pixels. Larger screens are growing in popularity but unless you are certain that your target audience is likely to be using them, stick with a smaller page size. Also check how your pages display in different web browsers – displaying properly in the popular Mozilla Firefox and Microsoft Internet Explorer browsers is a minimum requirement. Long pages that require scrolling down … and down … and down are also poor practice. It’s better to create a number of pages than have this toilet roll effect.

Provide alternate text for images

If you use graphics for navigation (such as buttons) or rely on images to display products, provide an alternative text (ALT text) description in the HTML code. ALT text provides a text equivalent of the image. There are a number of reasons for including a text description:

• People with low bandwidth connections may opt not to load graphics
• It is helpful to visitors using assistive technology (the ALT text is read out for the hearing impaired for instance), and
• It can contribute to a better ranking in search results since most search engines interpret the meaning of objects by analysing their ALT attribute

But be warned – there’s a real art to constructing and using ALT text. The text need not be a literal description of what the image represents. There’s not much point in using the ALT text ‘microwave oven’ if the image is meant to display the product’s most attractive selling features. The ALT text will be better used describing those features.

Keep download time to a minimum

Visitors resent waiting for slow downloading pages. Decrease loading time by paying attention to the size of the webpage. Website developers suggest a maximum of 30K for a webpage overall. Thus, if you have three 6K images on the page, you should not add more than 12K of HTML and text. It’s preferable to increase the number of pages rather than overload a single page.

Davies McLennon are Stockport Accountants

Tuning up your website by implementing just two basic principles will improve your chances of keeping visitors interested in looking around and progressing to a purchase.

1. Make The Navigation Customer-Centric

While part of the pleasure of shopping in a bricks ‘n mortar store may be the ability to leisurely browse your way over to the item you came in for, that’s generally not the approach of the website store visitor. These shoppers are very intolerant of delay in getting to the product they want by being forced to click through numerous pages, or worse, being so frustrated by poor navigation that they can’t even find what they are looking for at all. Customer-centric navigation tools guide shoppers directly to the products they want to buy before they lose interest.

If you sell a lot of different product lines try to classify them in some way that brings all the items in a particular line together. For instance, if you were selling pool supplies you might use categories like ‘pool cleaners’, ‘pool pumps’ ‘pool heating’, ‘pool filters’, and ‘pool toys’. If there aren’t a great number of these categories then display an individual navigation tab for each, otherwise a drop down menu from a ‘Products List’ tab is a better approach. Use the terms that the target audience is likely to use and recognise – common descriptions if you sell retail to the general public or technical terms if you deal with people in the trade.

A category listing should be only one of the ways of providing access to your products. Search functionality is necessary to complement the ability to browse around in categories. Searches can be set up in any number of ways. A particularly useful method is to provide an A-Z listing of all products so that a person looking for ‘Floating Pool Lights’ can locate them by looking under F and clicking straight through to a list of the types you hold. Even more helpful would be to also have them listed under P (‘Pool Lights – Floating’) and L (‘Lights – Floating Pool Type’) to cover the different ways people approach searching for items.

Some visitors will already have a particular brand in mind while others will be after a replacement part from a particular manufacturer so an A-Z listing of products by manufacturer is also helpful. The shopper in need of a replacement ‘Poolrite’ cartridge filter can go straight to the information on them. Even a parts number search is useful in some situations.

If you deal with price conscious shoppers then the ability to sort results by price can make it easier for them to make a choice. Finally, allow for the user who just isn’t sure and provide a general keyword search option.

2. Make It Easy To Buy

Having made it easy for your visitor to find what they want, now make it simple for them to buy it.

First thing is to provide multiple payment options. These days most website shoppers expect to be able to make their payment online – more than 90% of all online business is done using credit cards. True, not everyone is comfortable providing their card details over the Internet and not everyone likes to shop with a credit card, so to cater to these customers also provide more traditional pay routes like ordering by telephone, by fax and by mail.

Central to making a sale is the design of your checkout process. Studies reveal a distressingly high rate of cart abandonment by online shoppers. There are many contributing factors but in most instances it is simply that the customer can’t follow the process because of unclear navigation. Common features for a smooth checkout include giving the customer the option to continue shopping or proceed to checkout as each item is added to their cart, showing the details of each item they put in their cart including an image of the product and a link back to the page they found it on, and making it easy for visitors to change their mind by altering quantities or removing an item.

Your Internet store is not only open 24×7, it is visible worldwide – so consider what would make purchasing from it easy for a shopper located in another country. Provide your full street address to reassure the customer that they are dealing with a legitimate business. Add a handy currency converter and provide solid information on postage and handling costs.

Instead of just costing you money, a well designed customer-centric website will start doing what it’s supposed to do – making you money.

3. Are you getting the hits? Having a website is one thing, having it ranked highly with Google is something entirely different. It is usually well worth investing money in optimising the ranking of your website. Do not make the mistake of assuming your webdeveloper is doing this for you. It takes time and effort, and unless you reach an agreement and pay for it, you can safely assume it not being done.

Davies McLennon are happy to give independent advice on how you can address these issues.