8 Essential Steps:
- Define the most important action that you want the audience to take. Is it filling in an enquiry form? Call your toll free number? Download an information pack?
- Make it dead easy for them to take that action. 1 click or 2 clicks. Not 5 clicks
- Make your forms super short. Ask for essential information only. Not their age, not their gender, not even their address (if you aren’t posting them something, don’t ask for it). And it doesn’t matter if some of your form field aren’t compulsory, if it looks too long it will turn people away
- Ensure your code is search engine friendly:
- Clean urls like “this-is-a-page-about-how-to-do-stuff.html” rather than “index.php?ss=2&s=abc”
- Clean html code, eg use H1, H2, H3 tags instead of heavily formatted paragraph tags
- A stripped down CMS for commonly updated content (like blog entries, articles, products). Lock down other pages so you’re not tempted to wreck them with crazy fonts and colours
- “Write for the web” by formatting all your content with headings, sub-headings, short paragraphs (none more than 3 sentences), bullet points, numbered lists, and internal hyperlinks
- Follow usability guidelines, such as:
- Hyperlinks that look link hyperlinks. Buttons that look like buttons
- Breadcrumbs so when the users deep-link they can quickly figure out where they are
- Disable the hyperlink in the navigation if the user is already on that page
- And just about everything else website usability guru Jacob Nielsen recommends
- Choose a web site developer who knows about all this stuff
Other Important Things
- Ensure all your navigation is in one place (preferably displayed vertically on the left so it can scale as your website grows)
- Don’t have any animation or moving images at all. It distracts the user from completing their task
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