Knowledge base tag: usability
How to turn website visitors into paying customers
The most important part of your website is the text. The purpose of your website is to turn visitors into customers. Having a website that your visitors can relate to and which communicates the message of who you are and what sets you apart is best achieved by a well-planned and relevant web content development.
The purpose of your text is for people to read it and get the message
When trying to persuade potential customers to go with your company, you must give them something. People find is easier to trust and relate to website text that is informational, to-the-point and easy to read. When web-publishing text created for print, optimizing the text for web readability can make it many times more effective.
How new customers can find you on their own.
A great way to save money on offline marketing of your website, is to optimize your content to contain the keywords that your potential customers are searching for. This way interested visitors will arrive organically at your website.
Making sure that people can find your website where they search for it (Google, Yahoo, MSN and such) requires web content which has been optimized for findability. Findability optimization is an important part of search engine optimization (SEO).
Our services include:
- Web content development
- Web readability optimization
- Findability optimization
Contact us to know more about how a thoughtful and well-planned web project can benefit your business, or learn about how good web design delivers your message more effectively in ‘Show what you want to say: Visual communication‘.
Show what you want to say: Visual communication
A clear connection between communication and design makes it easier for the visitor to trust and identify with your company. A strong visual communication is achieved by supporting the message with the power of colour-psychology and the subliminal messages delivered by shapes, fonts and images.
Web design
First impressions are important and the design is the first thing a visitor sees. The design of your website must speak to the visitors and make them feel that they have come to the right place.
The aim of a good web design is to
- engage the visitor in the content and
- hold on to the visitor long enough to
- deliver the message.
Only by designing a user-friendly layout and navigation interface is it possible to present web content in a relevant visual context.
Company identity & logo design
For your customers to remember what sets you apart, they have to be able to recognise you. In order to maintain a clear connection between communication and design, your company’s visual communication must be consistent in everything from logo and website to business cards and stationary.
Our services include:
- Web design
- Usability optimisation
- Company identity design
Contact us to know more about how visual communication can benefit your business, or learn about future-proofing your website and how you can control the content of your website in ‘Creating websites that work: Web development‘
Creating websites that work: Web development
A website that doesn’t work is not a website at all, and it only really matters what your website looks like on your visitor’s screen.
Web users have a very low tolerance for websites that don’t work the way they should and they are quick to move on to the next choice. If your website is not developed properly you risk losing potential customers. Truly cross-browser compatible websites can be viewed in all common web browsers on many different platforms, from PC to Apple, big screens, small screens and with all kinds of user settings. We’ll make sure your website is validated by the World Wide Web consortium to comply with international web standards in HTML and CSS.
Control the content on your website: Content management
Things change, and you should be able to keep up with these changes.
- Update your own website content and save time and money.
- Easy to use, our CMS solution comes with an easy to understand step-by-step user-manual
- with a Content Management System you can keep your website updated yourself, whenever you want.
Contact us to find out more about the benefits of good Web Development, or learn about how to market your website to your target group through search engines in ‘Market your website through search engines‘
Web content: Acronyms are bad for your website
Acronyms on websites are bad for human visitors as well as robot visitors.
The use of acronyms (such as “CAD” instead of “Computer Aided Design”) on a website is a problem for the usability of the website, specifically because it lowers the readability of the webpage. Acronyms make web text less understandable, lowers the reading speed, and lowers the user-experience in general. Keeping in mind that web users are usually very impatient it is not a good idea to slow them down. They will loose their patience. And then you will loose the sale.
When reading web text, visitors often scan the text rather than reading it (word for word). This means they might miss the definition of an acronym or they might be too distracted to learn a new term.
Your visitors are looking for information - not puzzles
Good web content writing is about telling stories. There is a story in the phrase “Web design & development”. Even if you have never heard this phrase it still gives you an idea of the meaning of the term. There is no story in “WD&D”. These are just letters, and they could mean any number of things. Web content should be specific and informational.
Bad communication is bad for business
While acronyms themselves do not tell a story, using them unfortunately tells a story of laziness, arrogance and snobbish exclusiveness. It is very rarely the aim to communicate these values to the reader.
By using acronyms you are asking people to pay very close attention and that is a big thing to ask from users on the web. You risk chasing away visitors.
Also a problem for search engine optimization.
In regards to search engine optimization, “business services” is a good key-phrase that your potential customers might be searching for, so it is important to get that indexed by search engines like Google and Yahoo. “BS” on the other hand is not a very good key-phrase. Using this acronym you are actually removing this key-phrase from your content, thus lowering the relevancy of your website in the search engines for people searching for that particular key-phrase. And that is of course a very bad idea.
To optimize your web content for usability, readability, findability, try replacing acronyms with their long form - your text will be easier to read and easier to understand.
You should only use acronyms on web pages in situations where the acronym has universal consensus and is so commonly known that the acronym has replaced its long form in everyday use. Situations like this might be CD, DVD, MP3, etc.
In cases where it is necessary to use an acronym it is a good idea to still define the long form of the acronym. On web pages this is done using the acronym-tags, which adds the long form definition to the acronym as a hover-effect, like this example: SEO (try to move the cursor over the acronym “SEO”).
Contact us to know more about how Search Engine Optimization can benefit your business.
Categories
