Novice entrepreneurs have to overcome several obstacles on their way of establishing a flourishing business. The bumps on the road consist mainly of three major challenges:
- producing start up funds,
- finding prospects
- efficiently closing the sale.
And while many beginner businessmen know that first and foremost they need a good web site to kick start their business; few know the five must-have qualities of a really powerful website.
These five qualities are the following:
- a strong about section,
- a clean and easy to navigate menu bar,
- a professional look,
- customer testimonials
- no annoying ads at all.
This pattern has become an industry standard for conversion-oriented web-design so you cannot settle for anything less than that. Now let’s see how these features can empower your website to work for you 24/7 with astounding results.
1. A strong about page is essential in that it provides detailed information about the your services and needs conscious design solutions that goes beyond the contents of the section. The presentation needs to be carefully orchestrated to be able to efficiently call the prospect to action. Here is where introduce your services; the solution to your customer’s problems. The presentation needs to be cutting-edge to glue your prospects to their seats.
2. On the other hand, clean and easy navigation bar is what drives the flow of your site. It needs to be user-friendly, easy to use, and intuitive to produce the best results. While there are several designer tools to create menu bars, you have to aim for more than just fancy code; it is imperative that your designer understands the color psychology and underlying marketing tricks of the trade to create the perfect menu bar for your site.
3. Altogether you are aiming for a professional look, that creates an ideal first impression. There are a number of first-impression buyers out there whose purchase depends on the impression you create with your site, so it is in your best interest to provide a professional look that in and of itself is a reason to invoke a sense trust in your prospects.
4. And last but not least customer testimonials are an essential part of any professional small business site. It give you social credibility, which is a decisive factor in increasing conversion rates. Your prospects are much more likely to choose your services and trust you if they know that others have successfully benefited from your work before them. Many successful small businesses have customer testimonials on their sites and so should you.
5. And finally, ads. Ads oftentimes do more damage to conversion than anything else. You want a clean, intuitive design devoid of ads that distract your customer’s attention, or worse yet, annoy them until they just leave your site in frustration. You want your customers to stay and ads are working against you here, so eliminate all of them.
Your designer must know what your customer wants and must be willing to design a website with at least these five features. Your website needs to have a clean and easy to navigate menu bars, a strong „about” section and convincing customer testimonials but not a single ad.
In order to be successful, small businesses need a carefully designed website that is constructed with the above mentioned five conversation-oriented design choices in mind that attract prospects to you and help close the sale with as many of them as possible. The result is a site with a professional look that gets the job done.
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