The Conversion Friendly Website Design Checklist

Conversion is the ability to take your prospects and turn them into customers, and this is made easier with a website that has been designed, navigated and presented specifically for your target audience.

A Website can be a Business’s most Powerful Asset, or its own Worst Enemy

Too many businesses think of their website as an online brochure or business card. The fact is, the Internet has changed; there is more competition and the average consumer demands more from the sites that they visit.

Is your Website Conversion Friendly? Here is the Checklist:

1. Does it Load Fast?

Customers are impatient! We’ve all done it; a site doesn’t instantly load and we hit the back button. Don’t be fooled into thinking that your website is the exception.

Conversion friendly websites should also load well (no broken images, glitches etc) and appear in all browsers such as Internet Explorer and Chrome, and on all platforms including tablets and Smartphones.

2. Does your Website Theme Match the Business and the Customer’s Expectation?

This is a very common problem. A baby stroller website shouldn’t be designed in industrial steel gray with sharp borders and a construction company’s site should not be in pastels. The design should say just as much as the text. The website should speak volumes to what the business is about, even before a single word has been read.

3. How’s your Navigation?

Can your products/service/information be found very easily or does it take 3-4 clicks to find “the main attraction?” Customers will get frustrated if they are faced with walls of text and if they can’t find what they are looking for. This includes disorganized products, difficulty with searches on the site and any unclear or confusing instruction.

Don’t forget about your main navigation bar, contact pages and bios. These are components of a website that customers want to find easily and quickly.

Ecommerce sign ups have to be simple and completed with as few steps as possible. Some shopping cart systems cost more to have fewer steps in the checkout process. This may be one area to invest more in because three steps instead of seven will make enough of a difference that the initial investment will earn itself back.

4. Contact Us

Contacts and phone numbers should be a good size and placed prominently on the website, ideally on every page. Customers should not have difficulty finding phone numbers, email addresses and directions and an address for physical retail locations. A phone number that is placed at the top of every page has shown to be very effective.

A strong call to action seems obvious but many businesses do not include an “invitation” to sign up, make a purchase, or to contact for more information.

5. A “Clean” Site

So far, all of these points have been about making it easy and attractive for the customer. But what about conversion friendly website design for search engines?

If your website is heavily coded, all in Flash or doesn’t have enough high quality content and information the major search engine’s algorithm’s, such as Google, will not be able to properly crawl the website. A crawl-able website equals discovered relevancy and improved rankings.

After the Conversion Friendly Website Design

Having a conversion friendly website is extremely important but it does no end there. After the design and launch, the business owner has to do his or her part, to convert leads into sales and signups:

• Are you answering the phone?
• If you miss the call, do you have a professional voicemail?
• Do you respond to inquiries quickly?
• Are you polite on the phone?
• Are your emails well written with proper grammar and sentence structure?
• Are you knowledgeable and helpful?
• Is your price competitive?

Conversion friendly websites are also measured and tracked with analysis. The effectiveness of the site should not rely on guess work. Content experiments should be conducted and event tracking needs to be implemented so that site owners begin to see where their customers are abandoning sales funnels.

While conversion friendly websites are by no means a quick fix, the end result will generate more leads, represent the company more effectively and in competitive markets, give the business the edge over its competition.