You’ve seen those websites, the ones which sell things to people. You’ve also made one yourself. Problem is, there’s also another website that sells the same things your site does. For some reason, you also know the number of hits they have per day. And compared to your site’s hits, they sure do seem like a lot. But as far as you know their services and yours don’t differ that much in price, quality, shipping, etc… so why are they getting the same amount of customers that you have in a week… daily?
There are a lot of factors that could affect that. One of them is web design. Look at your site. Compare it with theirs. What looks easier on the eyes, their brown-white-cream color theme or your shocking pink text over a neon green background? In the net, many people just judge a book by its cover. Or in this case, a website by its design. You know why? That’s because there are a lot more sites out there that they can browse. If they don’t like this site, they can find its services on some other site. To them, your site is totally disposable unless proven otherwise. Unfortunately, the same can’t be said for you to them. Customers and visitors (which are potential customers) are what your site needs. Unless you want none of any, you’d better start shaping up your site.
A good way of doing that is by applying CSS themes so that the site will look more pleasing to your clients. A customized theme is also a great idea since you can insert product-related colors into the color theme. With that in mind, it’s great if you know how to use CSS codes and apply them to your site, but knowledge of Photoshop and a good plug-in like SiteGrinder ought to suffice.
Try to follow the principles of web 2.0: clean-cut graphics, simple but effective designs, functional and creative usage of flash, and the like. Try to bear in mind the preferences of your customer target market. What will your targets appreciate more, bright and bold colors, or darker, rich colors? Will they like the graphics that you’ve put in the site? Some customers might not like the web interface and choose to go to another site instead. Tinker around with Photoshop and SiteGrinder to see what mixture of things would look best for your site.
And of course, who would buy from a site that doesn’t show their wares? Make sure that well-took images of your products are shown in your pages, to give your customers an idea of what they’re spending a month’s worth of allowance for. And remember to add additional description to each of your products, like size, price, expiration date, etc. because it’s likely that people will go looking for those.
Lastly, make sure that your website actually looks serious and professional. If it doesn’t look serious enough, people might mistake it for a scam site, and who wants to spend money just to get scammed? Of course, nobody. Then nobody will buy from you at all.
Change your site’s design today, and who knows, the customers might start flooding in tomorrow.