What is the most important aspect of your website?
It’s to sell of course, whether you want customers to order right from your site, call you for an appointment or walk through your storefront, at the end of the day you want as many people as possible to “buy” whatever you’re selling.
What do your customers want though? A lot of business owners and even web designers are surprised. More than flashy banners, a beautiful design and a clever tagline, in surveys 76% of web users said they wanted a site that was SIMPLE.
This means easy to find links to the important pages, it should be organized in an intuitive manner, your website should be free of clutter, and your primary benefits and call to action should be easy to find and the focal point of each and every page of your website. Finally, the actual content needs to be high quality and well-edited. Content plays a second role as well. Along with doing the brunt of the selling of your product or service, the content also plays an important role in the searchability of your site and where it ranks on Google.
The next thing users want from a website is one that loads quickly. This has to do with a number of factors including your potential customer’s web browser, but your site plays a role as well. A simple site usually loads faster, so you are killing two birds with one stone. Things that can slow down a website include Flash banners and other applications. Make sure your site has a large enough bandwidth for the number of visitors you expect to get at any given time. If you have a custom site this is something to look into. For the site we make at you at 411 Locals we make sure you have plenty of bandwidth, so that at least is one less thing to worry about.
Conclusion: All things equal opt for simplicity over flashy banners and other bells and whistles. That is not to say these things cannot play a role. A good designer will be able to integrate these things into a simple site. Before making your site public, make sure it’s fast. By itself these two things will increase your conversion rate.