Posts in ‘Design’

Julia thinks the ‘BUY NOW’ button should be green; Tim says orange, like Amazon. Does this kind of debate sound familiar?

Split testing (often called A/B testing) can get the real answers to questions like these.

Here’s how it works:

• Make both versions — one page with orange and one page with green.
• Randomly show site visitors one version or the other.
• Track these visitors and measure which works best.
• Go forward with the better version.

It really is that simple.

You’ve all heard the saying “a picture is worth a thousand words”. If this is true, then shouldn’t you be paying a bit more attention to each and every image you display on your website?

Simply put, good images and photos communicate your products value and help you sell more. But whilst images can work well at changing visitors into buyers, they can also prevent this from occurring.

To help convert more site browsers into customers, try these basic tips:

Many web analytics tools such as Google Analytics allow you to measure the effectiveness of your online conversion funnels, in an effort to optimise your website’s conversion rates. But you may question how effective this really is.

The concept of a conversion funnel has been adapted from the traditional offline sales model of moving a consumer along a series of steps from lead, to prospect, to sales proposal, and finally, to close.

In the online world, conversion funnels adopt the same linear approach, and include steps such as home page, category page, product page, shopping cart, and finally, check-out. Many use a number of conversion funnels for measuring conversion rate optimisation.

Basing your conversion rate optimisation on linear conversion funnels is a good starting point, but it does tend to assume that people want to participate in the sales funnel the way they’re expected to. Therefore, if this is your only means of optimising your sales process, you could be selling yourself short.

Christmas is now less than 90 days away, and for many shoppers, online Christmas shopping will begin very soon. Obviously you’ll be wanting to convert as many of these browsers into buyers as possible!

For online retailers, Christmas is the time where you can really reap the rewards of providing a stunning online experience for your customers. But it’s also the time of year where you can lose the most in sales opportunities if your customers aren’t given what they need.

In this article, we thought we’d give you some food for thought when it comes to deciding what treatments and embellishments you may be considering for your Christmas-ready website.

OK, a provocative question granted, but it’s not one that I ask, it’s the question that I’m getting asked all the time by e-business owners who’ve spent heaps on their website, perhaps for the second or third time even, and still not getting the business results they are looking for.

The reality is that the vast majority of business owners are in the laps of the gods when it comes to website design. They may have some goals, but only a small number of these poor people have a good sense of what’s really needed to achieve them.

So these good poor people, experience the pain and then come to us saying “Are our web designers at fault for getting wrong?” To be honest, it’s a bit of a curly question with no simple answer but their certainly are some common factors I see that I believe are central to many of the failures.