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Is_your_site_ready_to_face_the_New_Year
| Is your site ready to face the New Year?
As we look back at another year, and forward to another,
there’s time to reflect on how our websites performed in the
last year and decide on what improvements need to be made for
the New Year ahead. This is the first part of a two-part article
that looks at 10 things that a website owner can do to improve
their websites for the New Year. Did your site
perform as well as it could have in 2004?
If you own an ecommerce store, did it receive as many orders as
you’d have liked during the festive period? Did you get lots of
support requests asking for further information? Did your site
suffer from a high abandonment rate? We all need our sites to be
successful and produce a return on investment on the cost of
promotion and advertising. However, it’s easy to be taken in by
technology and miss the basics that will help improve the
performance of your website, decrease abandonment and increase
conversion.
The list below identifies 10 ways in which you can improve your
website. All of the improvements can be made without major
investment, new technology or the need for additional
resources: 1. Ensure that you make your
USP/benefits clear on every page 2. Ensure that provide
improved ways in which your visitors can contact you 3.
Improve the quality of the information on your site such that
they can make informed purchasing decisions 4. Ensure
that your site is accessible to all visitors and search
engines 5. Add new ways of delivering content to 3rd
parties 6. Improve conversion through removing
unnecessary registration and requests for too much
information 7. Offer greater customer service through
not only meeting ecommerce regulations but surpassing them
8. Improve the site such that it offers an improved
user-experience 9. Stop worrying about page rank and
start focusing on customers 10. Take time to understand
how visitors use your site and learn from that knowledge
1. Ensure that you make your USP/benefits clear on
every page
The Internet breaks down many boundaries. Not only has the
Internet made it possible for everyone to trade online, but it
has also removed geographical barriers making it far easy to
purchase products from overseas. However, as an ecommerce site
owner, this leads to increased competition. In the high-street,
you may have had a handful of competitors. Now, you may have
hundreds or thousands. Therefore, it’s necessary to stand out
from the crowd and clearly identify your business and websites
USPs and benefits. These may be: Price
Product quality Service quality Product
knowledge Product uniqueness Product
availability Free delivery
No matter what your USPs are, make sure that they are clearly
identified on your website and make sure that these USPs are
visitor-focused by asking yourself the question, how does the
USP benefit the visitor. 2. Ensure that provide improved
ways in which your visitors can contact you
Visitors are bound to have questions regarding the
products/services that you provide as well as about your
business. In order to assist visitors make informed decisions,
it’s important that you provide the answers to these questions
on your site. There are a number of ways of doing this. These
include : Frequently asked questions – as you
receive new questions from visitors, ensure that you add them to
your FAQ About us information Improved product
information
However, it’s clearly not always possible to pre-empt the full
range of questions a visitor may ask. Therefore, make sure that
you make it easy for visitors to contact you if they have
questions. Also, ensure that these ways of communicating with
you are clearly identified on your website by locating them in
the header area of each page. Popular means of allowing visitors
to contact you include: Email Telephone –
clearly identify the hours that you can be contacted
Contact us form – an improvement on email as you can direct
visitors to include information to enable you to be able to
provide an improved service Live Help – only provide
live help if you are able to support it full time Call
me – make it easier by calling visitors back at a mutually
convenient time VoIP (e.g. Skype or Vonage) – save
money by using Internet telephony Ticket-based
support Forums 3. Improve the quality of
the information on your site such that they can make informed
purchasing decisions
Unless you sell unique products or services, there’s the
possibility that you use product information provided by the
product manufacturer or supplier. Although this information can
be very detailed, in most cases, it isn’t or the information is
targeted more at those selling the product rather than those
wanting to purchase it.
Due to the ease in which the information can be used on your
site, it’s likely to be used on many of your competitor’s sites
too.
Stand out from the crowd and provide personalised content about
the products and services that you sell. After all, to be able
to sell your products and services, you need to be familiar with
their use, features and unique selling points. Make sure that
the product details you provide include as much information as
possible in an easy-to-read and enticing format. 4.
Ensure that your site is accessible to all visitors and search
engines
Many ecommerce stores remain inaccessible to many visitors and
search engines. Given the need to ensure that all websites are
accessible to visitors with disabilities, it is very important
to ensure that your website meets the WCAG guidelines for
website accessibility. For more information about the
guidelines, check out the RNIB’s Web Access Centre at
http://www.rnib.org.uk/xpedio/groups/public/documents/code/public
_rnib008789.hcsp.
Some of the most important visitors to your website are search
engine spiders. These spiders visit the pages on your site and
are used to rank the pages within the search engines for
particular keywords and phrases. The spiders follow links to
your site from other sites, and then follow the links within the
site. However, there are certain impediments that may prevent
spiders from getting to some or all pages within your website.
These include: Use of JavaScript menus – some
JavaScript menus do not include links to internal pages within
the website that search engine can follow. If possible, replace
the JavaScript menu with an alternate CSS based menu.
Use of dynamic URL parameters – search engines are getting
more tolerant to having multiple parameters in URLS. However, it
is still advised that no more than 3 or 4 parameters are used.
Use of session IDs – Many ecommerce stores require the
use of session information in order to be able to maintain
information about visitors as they interact with the store.
However, if session IDs are passed as URL parameters, they can
prevent search engines from spidering the website.
It is very important that these impediments are removed in order
that your site can be completely spidered. For example, an
ecommerce site may have many thousands of pages (associated with
the products). However, through the use of too many dynamic URL
parameters or session IDs, the major search engines many only be
able to list a handful. This therefore gives less content
available within the search engines associated with your website
that could potentially be found by a search engine user.
5. Add new ways of delivering content to 3rd parties
Article and news syndication using RSS (Really Simple
Syndication) is becoming widespread across the Internet.
However, to date, syndication of content for ecommerce stores
hasn’t been as popular. This is set to change and ecommerce site
owners start to use content syndication to keep their visitors
and customers up to date with their: Latest
news Special offers
The use of content syndication can be used to replace the need
to publish opt-in newsletters. This saves you time and ensures
that your visitors/customers are always up-to-date with the
latest developments on your website.
In part 2 of this article, we will provide more detail about the
following tips for website success in 2005: 6.
Improve conversion through removing unnecessary registration and
requests for too much information 7. Offer greater
customer service through not only meeting ecommerce regulations
but surpassing them 8. Improve the site such that it
offers an improved user-experience 9. Stop worrying
about page rank and start focusing on customers 10.
Take time to understand how visitors use your site and learn
from that knowledge
About the author:
James Saunders is the Managing Director of Site-Report.com
Limited (http://www.site-report.com), a UK internet consultancy
offering holistic advice to UK SMEs on all aspects of website
development and promotion including usability, accessibility,
ecommerce regulations, internet marketing and search engine
optimisation.
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