If you are a business owner or you own a website that involves credit card transactions, you've gotta make sure your customers trust you. See, nobody would even bother to read more about your paid services, whatever they are, if your website doesn't look professional. Nowadays, there are many scams in the internet, hence people usually don't give credit to the companies & services they don't know. This article will help you to optimize your website, so that it inspires confidence.
Eliminate pop-ups
You must have come across those websites that brutally force you to sign up for a newsletter, or click on banner, or whatever. Don't do that, because pop-ups look unprofessional! Many people associate pop-ups with scams, or spam. You don't want that. I myself tend to click away as soon as something that I don't expect pops up. Nobody likes that.
Get rid of FLASH
Alright - Flash used to be cool ten years ago. Now it's being used mainly by private persons to present their portfolio. This is a bad idea to build your business website with Flash. There are many reasons for that, but just to name a few :
- Search engines don't see Flash content. In other words, your site won't be indexed properly, and you have no chance to rank high in Google/Yahoo. This will probably kill your business within several weeks. Not to mention that...it's very unprofessional!
- Flash based websites are hard to update - you probably can't do it yourself, do you? It means, you will need to hire a webdesigner every time you want an update. And as you might know already, business website needs to be updated very often in order to attract customers. Nobody will visit a website that has been dead for weeks.
- Flash is slow! - and people don't like to wait. If your website doesn't load within 2 seconds, guess what happens. People click away.
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- Nobody likes Flash - why? Because people are used to certain interface that they've been using for years. Your visitors will hate it when they can't click the "back button." Perhaps the interface is not a big deal when it comes to arty sites, like photographer portfolios, etc. But it does matter when people come to your site to do business.
Use minimalistic design
There is a reason for this unbelievable popularity of Google.
Minimalism works great, because it lets people enjoy your website regardless of their visual preferences. Please note, everybody has a unique set of design preferences, even if he/she is not aware of it. If you try to fulfill any specific set of preferences (which in most cases would be your own), you will make a large part of your visitors click away only because they didn't enjoy the design. No matter how hard you try to create a design that everybody would like, it won't happen. However, if you go for a minimalistic design, your visitors will be able to focus on the functionality, not the way your website looks. Minimalistic design works great for e-shops and business sites.
Stick to the "business" colors
It might sound silly, but some colors are considered more "business" than the others. First off, if you want your customers trust you, don't use too many colors. Use white color for background (it implies - clean, trustworthy), and grey or dark grey for text. Many business sites use blue links and either blur or dark red headings. It not only looks great, but also makes your user recognize the colors and associate them with "business site" on unconscious level. And that's exactly what you want. Of course, I'm not saying you should not be more creative than that.
No fancy fonts
You probably have seen those sites that use fancy fonts just for the heck of it. It doesn't look professional, does it? Use fonts that look serious and are easy to read. For business sites Arial works best (or Helvetica). It's not fancy at all, but it looks serious. Tahoma or Verdana might work as well, bud don't use Georgia. Since this is a Wordpress default font, it is mostly associated with blogging. Remember, don't use more than one font. Keep your site in one style. Mixing different fonts looks amateur.
Provide full contact information
Unlike other sites, business sites are expected to provide as detailed contact information as possible. Don't use contact forms. Let your visitors know your real email address. There are ways to cipher the address to avoid crawling it by spam bots. Make sure your email is hosted on your business domain, for example: info@yoursite.com. I think it's obvious that business emails hosted on Gmail or Hotmail don't look professional, right? Don't forget to include your address and phone number. This is important! Your customers want to know how they can reach you before they use their credit card.
Keep your content fresh
If you own a business site, you have to make sure it's always up to date. Your visitors will click away immediately when they see news from past month, believe me. It's your responsibility to keep your site updated. Daily updates will bring the best results!