Category: Design

Take a 5 second look at your website, and then close your eyes.

What were the top three things that you noticed? If those top three things are not related to the top three things directly related to helping your business turn visitors into customers, your site isn’t implementing Goal Oriented Design principals.

Goal Oriented Design is a layout philosophy that prominently features the information and/or activities on your site that are most relevant to bringing in new business. Every business has a different sales cycle, customer profile, and website activities that help bring in new customers. For example, one business might have a high conversion rate for those who sign up for an e-newsletter, another might have good success with offering a free survey or trial download. The point is, that each and every business has a specific set of activities or information, that it can provide on its website that helps it bring in new business. These set of activities, or Goals, are what should be featured prominently on the site.

So, when you are looking to develop a new website or redesign an existing one, the following steps will help you develop a design and layout that helps you meet your business goals:

1. Examine your sales cycle. What are the activities and/or information that prospects typically need before they decide to buy?
   1. Are there a series of FAQs or specific questions that most prospects ask?
   2. Do you tend to convert people who read your newsletter?
   3. Do prospects need to compare your product or service to one of your competitors?
2. Distill this list down to three to five distinct activities or key pieces of information. These will be your Goals and you will want to create design elements that feature these items prominently in your layout.
3. Create a design/layout that make each of those items prominent on every page on your website. Adding these elements to just the homepage on your site will minimize the effect. In most cases many people enter your site through a page other than the home page. Moreover, you never know when they will decide to click on the item that you are trying to feature and don’t want them to have to find their way back to the home page to do it.

For example: look at http://www.personalstockstreamer.com. The two prominent buttons on the home page, and at the top of every sub page on the site, correlate to the two most important parts of this business’s sales cycle: offering a free download so that prospects can try out the product, and making it easy for prospects to read about the feature set offered in the software. When you first look at the site, these items “jump out at you” and are easy to find.

So, take a 5 second look at your website and then close your eyes.

What are the top three things you remember? Are those things that your prospects are interested in, or will give them the information that they need to move them along the path of your sales cycle? If not, your site might not be doing everything that it could to help you bring in new business.

With a little bit of business introspection and some modifications to your site you can go a long way to help increasing your site’s effectiveness.

— Ryan Chapin
President, Nuts & Bolts Interactive, Inc.

Knowing your most popular entry point helps you determine the kind of content that is driving traffic to your site.  This in turn helps you determine what kind of changes and additional content you should add to your site to help boost your success.  There are a number of different tracking and reporting packages that can answer this question.  NBI provides a hosted tracking solution called goalTracker which enables you to answer that and many other questions about your website traffic.  However, regardless of whether or not you know what your most popular entry page is, there are still a number of things you can, and should, do to your site to help increase its effectiveness.

As I mentioned, more often than not, the most popular entry page on your site is not the home page.  Search engines categorize and provide links to every single page on your site.  People will post links to various pages in forums and send links to their colleagues in e-mail.  As a result, your ENTIRE WEBSITE should be geared towards being an entry point for a new visitor.

That might sound like a tall order but there are a few simple things that you can do with your site to make sure that every page provides the necessary information to your new website visitors.  Add the following to each page on your site:

• Include your logo and a tagline:  Answer the question who are you and what do you do?  Make sure to have your logo (or some other indication of your business?s name) and a tagline prominent on each page.  Some sites have web pages that include pop-up pages, or pages that are only supposed to be viewed from another page on the site that don?t include the basic information about the company.  Someone might start their visit on that page, and if they can?t quickly figure out who you are and what you do for them, you may lose out on a new prospect.
• Include links to pages that are valuable to your visitors:  What information are they most likely looking for or is of value to them?  One of the most important things you can do is to make your site a resource for people who might be looking for your products or services (see this article: “Write Your Website Content with Your Visitor In Mind” for more info).  Do you have a Free Resources section?  A Blog?  List of Articles or other content for your visitors?  If so, make sure there is a prominent link to that section on each and every page.
• Include a top and/or side navigational bar:  What are the most important pages on your site?  Include them in some sort of prominent navigation that is on every page.  In many cases that navigation will include something like: Home, About Us, Services, Products, Free Resources, Contact Us.  This makes it easy for someone to quickly see what you have to offer and to easily get around on your site.
• Conspicuous Specials, Features, or other important links:  If you have a specials page, or an important upcoming event, make sure to include a link.
• Include a Footer:  A footer is content that appears at the bottom of each page on your site.  In many cases you will want to include the following information.
  • The geographic area that you serve
  • Your phone number
  • Your address
• Avoid frames: If your site is designed in frames consider a re-design.  A frames based website displays a number of different independent web pages on a single screen.  This is fine as long as someone started their journey on the appropriate web page, but many times a search engine will categorize and provide a link to one of those pages and that page will not have any navigation, logo, tagline, or other information to give the visitor somewhere else to go.

Once you make these changes to your site every page will be a great entry page.

Most people assume that a visit to their website begins on their home page. The reality is that most website visits begin on other pages on the site and that those pages are not effective entry pages.

Do you know what your most popular entry page is?

Does the layout and design of your site enable those who enter any page to easily find out more about you and your offerings without leaving in frustration?

Regardless of whether you can answer the first question, there are a number of things that you can do to your site that will help you make the most out of your traffic no matter what page people use as an entry point.
Knowing your most popular entry point helps you determine the kind of content that is driving traffic to your site. This in turn helps you determine what kind of changes and additional content you should add to your site to help boost your success. There are a number of different tracking and reporting packages that can answer this question. NBI provides a hosted tracking solution called goalTracker which enables you to answer that and many other questions about your website traffic. However, regardless of whether or not you know what your most popular entry page is, there are still a number of things you can, and should, do to your site to help increase its effectiveness.

As I mentioned, more often than not, the most popular entry page on your site is not the home page. Search engines categorize and provide links to every single page on your site. People will post links to various pages in forums and send links to their colleagues in e-mail. As a result, your ENTIRE WEBSITE should be geared towards being an entry point for a new visitor.

That might sound like a tall order but there are a few simple things that you can do with your site to make sure that every page provides the necessary information to your new website visitors. Add the following to each page on your site:

• Include your logo and a tagline: Answer the question who are you and what do you do? Make sure to have your logo (or some other indication of your business name) and a tagline prominent on each page. Some sites have web pages that include pop-up pages, or pages that are only supposed to be viewed from another page on the site that dont include the basic information about the company. Someone might start their visit on that page, and if they cant quickly figure out who you are and what you do for them, you may lose out on a new prospect.
• Include links to pages that are valuable to your visitors:? What information are they most likely looking for or is of value to them? One of the most important things you can do is to make your site a resource for people who might be looking for your products or services (see this article: “Write Your Website Content with Your Visitor In Mind” for more info). Do you have a Free Resources section? A Blog? List of Articles or other content for your visitors? If so, make sure there is a prominent link to that section on each and every page.
• Include a top and/or side navigational bar:? What are the most important pages on your site? Include them in some sort of prominent navigation that is on every page. In many cases that navigation will include something like: Home, About Us, Services, Products, Free Resources, Contact Us. This makes it easy for someone to quickly see what you have to offer and to easily get around on your site.
• Conspicuous Specials, Features, or other important links:? If you have a specials page, or an important upcoming event, make sure to include a link.
• Include a Footer: A footer is content that appears at the bottom of each page on your site. In many cases you will want to include the following information.
  • The geographic area that you serve
  • Your phone number
  • Your address?
• Avoid frames: If your site is designed in frames consider a re-design. A frames based website displays a number of different independent web pages on a single screen. This is fine as long as someone started their journey on the appropriate web page, but many times a search engine will categorize and provide a link to one of those pages and that page will not have any navigation, logo, tagline, or other information to give the visitor somewhere else to go.

Once you make these changes to your site every page will be a great entry page.