If you ask someone who has no web design experience / knowledge to review a website, the main thing they will base their review on is the appearance of the website. They won’t know much else about how well it is built behind the scenes but they will know if it looks good or not. This topic is often touched upon when Ziller provides initial screen designs of a new site to a client – the majority of their feedback comes in the way of look and design, not the more important factors of website usability, how well it is being built for search engines and if its designed to achieve the overall goal or purpose of the site.
Now if you speak with someone who has web design experience and knows about website usability, they will tell you that the design and or appearance of a website is the very least important part, which in some aspects Ziller agrees with. If you are running an online business, the bottom line is usually the money that the website generates so therefore those other more important factors really come into play. I can pick out a thousand websites that look great, but do not do one thing to help in achieving the goal of the website.
In saying all this, the point of this post is to point out why a well designed website is still so very important, even more important if you are selling online. If you have not heard of a value proposition before, it is a way of convincing your users why they should buy / trust / use your website, usually in the form of text or banners. What I am here to say is that a professionally designed website is one very strong value proposition. Users will subconsciously trust a website if its well designed, and the opposite if its poorly designed. I know myself if I go to a website that is asking for money for a product or service that has a terrible design I am most likely to leave without buying – if they can’t afford to pay someone to design a nice website they obviously are not making much money?
If you currently run a online store that is poorly designed, I think you will be amazed at the increase in your conversion rate with a simple redesign.
This morning at approximately 9:30 the team at Ziller noticed something, Google was down. Both the .com.au and .com domain were inaccessible for around 15 minutes. It makes you realise they are human after all.
When a consumer enters a brick and mortar store and starts browsing some products they are interested in, what will they usually do next? they will choose a item their thinking of buying, pick it up and feel it, look at the front, back and sides and read the fine detail. More often then not they will then choose to buy the product that has better packaging and is more attractive on the outside, then the less attractive product even if the less attractive product is in fact better quality.
If you are thinking of starting a online business or already currently do, how do you try and replace what I just described above using your website? Just because a user is now online it doesn’t mean there shopping behavior has changed. If you cannot give the user a good indication of how that product is going to look / feel when it is in their own hands, the product is not going to sell, or at least not sell as much as if you did.
Having better product images is one of the most complained about factors of e-commerce stores. Too many stores out their place no importance on their product images, when this is one of the most critical areas and one where you should be putting much effort into.
If a user can visualise a product in their hands, the hard work is done. Work hard on that.
Website accounts in shopping carts are common things these days. It is not often that you will come across a e-commerce store that does not offer an account of some type with which you can register, in order to get added benefits. In fact many e-commerce websites make registration mandatory in order to even purchase, which is a hot topic and one which I have touched on in a older post.
As I see it, if you do offer an account with your e-commerce store, the goal would be to have as many of your users register for one as possible. Users who are registered are far more likely to make a purchase, and assuming you gained permission to send them email you can use this to promote new products and or services.
One thing I see common across even some leading e-commerce stores is the poor attempt to sell registration to the user. If you offer registration, whats so good about it? What do you get if you do register and why must the user do it? All these questions should be answered on your account sign-up page.
Take pcparts.net.au as a perfect example – their login page has only a couple of lines of text to promote the creation of an account. At this point in time as a user I have no idea what I get if you sign up so I will be very declined to do so.
pcparts.net.au
If your going to ask a user to not only give up their precious time, but provide personal information such as their email address, you have to offer in return something of equal or greater value.
For the last few weeks I have been in charge of promoting a product for Videopro, a client of ours who we built and manage a ecommerce website for that sells audio visual and computer solutions. The product I am talking about is the Livescribe 2GB Pulse Smart Pen.
In the beginning, my initial thoughts were that the price tag on the Livescribe Smart Pen was incredibly high for a pen, that was until I learnt a bit more about it. Because I was in charge of promoting the pen, like any good salesman you need to know a bit about what you are promoting, and so began reading into the features. I found a promotional video on youtube and after watching the video I instantly became interested. I convinced my boss to order one for the office and now we use it for all of our meetings.
The pen is pretty much a microcomputer that allows you to record while you are writing, so that you can listen to what you were hearing at the time of writing the notes. What it also does is link what you were writing to what you were hearing, so when you are revising your notes after your meeting, you can listen to what you were hearing when you were writing a particular sentence, so if that sentence doesn’t make sense or was written to messily, no problem, you can hear what was being said at the time.
The pen also has the ability to be plugged into your PC. After a meeting I can plug it into my computer which backs up my notes, and displays them as if I typed them onto the computer. There is also a search feature that allows me to search for a keyword that I wrote when writing my notes. You have to admit that is pretty handy!
The pen software will run both on Windows and Mac, and is something I definitely recommend for anyone who takes notes regularly. Even for someone is is perfect at taking notes, there are always times when your notes in sections are not so clear.
If you have not heard of them or shopped with them before, Big Brown Box are a relatively new online shopping website that sell a range of products online. Big Brown Box popped up almost a year ago now and most will agree that the their website is not badly designed at all. Its graphic design is done well, and the rest of the features are also well designed.
One thing we have noticed with Big Brown Box is the frequency that the website is down for maintenance. It seems that quite often this is the case, and in most cases it is for extended periods of time, on busy days. From experience weekdays, in particular those days early in the week are the most busy times for a shopping website, and in many cases these are the times when Big Brown Box is down for maintenance. As web developers we know that any website at times needs to be shut down for maintenance, but at two o’clock on a Sunday morning there is going to be a lot less traffic and is a much better time to do it then midday on a Monday.
Now it could well be the case that these frequent maintenance screens are not planned and are instead problems with the site, which even in a perfect world can happen. In this event what Big Brown Box really should be doing is offering a discount to the user – if the user is interrupted when trying to shop on your website, displaying a discount coupon on the screen they could use during their next purchase would help ensure they come back, and don’t purchase off one of your competitors.
Another thing which we noticed during these down periods was the fact that they had not paused their Google AdWords campaigns. We imagine that the Big Brown Box AdWords campaign is quite large so it would be sensible during these times to pause the campaign until the website is back up. This is good advice for any business owners running a online store, during down time ensure that any paid advertising is switched off as this can save you a great deal of money, and ensure that as little people as possible see your website off-line.
Ziller are very happy to announce that we have made the finals for the 2009 Sydney City Business Awards, and would like to thank everyone for their votes. With over 600 hundred business nominated and 35,000 combined votes, we are extremelly proud to be part of the top 5 finalists for the Information & Communication category.
Why should my company waste time by writing and managing a blog?
If your company currently does not have a blog, or if you do have a blog but do not pay much attention to it, you should be asking yourself, what can a blog do for me?
Having an up to date blog attached to your company website, or even as a separate website, will allow you to gain credibility from your clients, as it will show what goes on behind the scenes of your business, help describe your company philosophy and also keep your own staff up to date on what each other is up to.
A blog will also allow you to be able to choose what relationship you build with your client:
You can choose to show the human face of your company
Way for customers to ask and give opinions on new products and or services
Be a place where customers can share information and insights on their favorite products / services
Alternative communication media to more friendly distribute information and knowledge to your staff
From a marketing point of view, a blog can strengthen your image and increase awareness of your products/services, and additionally if it is kept up to date and all content is well written, it can act as link bait and help increase links to your website which will significantly help with your search engine rankings.
2nds World – www.2ndsworld.com.au, has been chosen for our next Banana Peel of the month. While 2nds World have not done a bad job in overall functionality of the website, it does have a very serious issue with its design. Among other things, 2nds World have chosen to use a very bright yellow as the main background colour of the site, so why is this so bad?
It is a proven scientific fact that there is much more light reflected by bright colours like yellow, and worse yet yellow is the major eye irritant which can hurt your eyes. As shown in the screen shot below, I am viewing this website with 1600 x 900 resolution and I cannot look at the screen for more then 10 seconds without needing the blink or squint my eyes. There is no way I would be prepared to spend 5 – 15 minutes on this website without a break.
A color like this type of yellow, should be used more sparingly to get attention where needed, what 2nds World have done, in my opinion is way over the top and does more damage then good.
Most often then not, it is the functionality of a website that will hurt the conversion path to sale, and while the functionality of this website is no where near perfect, it is in fact a design error that I believe is causing the most damage.
