Date: July 7,2008

You are receiving thousands of visitors every week. They are qualified visitors, resulting from search queries for precisely services and products that you sell. Only one problem: they are not buying. You have a problem with customer retention on your website. In 90% of cases, this is due to the design of your website. It’s time to re-think your website design.

Online consumers have become increasingly savvy about what a good website should look like. If yours does not fit the criteria then they are going to simply move on. Also there are basic features, such as strong calls to action, which push visitors to take action such as request a quote or contact you. Here are few things that you should pay attention to when re-designing your website:

Modernize. Web design trends are constantly evolving and you need to keep up. Multi-colored text was cool in the late 90’s but is definitely out of the picture today. Same goes for animated GIF’s. Now it is all about subtleties and classy web design. Minimalism has taken center stage along with sleek Flash designs.

Use Buttons. Give visitors something to push. Always provide your visitors with options. “Go here”, “go there”, “take a tour”, “request a quote”, etc. are all important means of keeping visitors on your site and encouraging them to take some sort of action, whether that be to buy or share your products online.

Don’t make them wait. Most visitors do not stay on a web page for longer than 3 seconds. If your page does not load in that time, than there is even less of a chance of visitors sticking around. If your pages look great thanks to loads of Flash effects, but take a long time to load, then consider re-doing your Flash graphics to better optimize them in size and load time.