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Website Conversion Secrets

1. It should take less than 10 seconds to load your website.

Use the online tools provided at http://www.iwebtool.com/speed_test or a straightforward dial-up service to check your website’s load time. You should be able to clock how long it takes for your website to load on a high-speed internet connection (i.e. broadband) in the United States.

The main culprits behind slow load times are graphics, so focus on these first if it takes too long to load your website. Shorten the load time of your website significantly by opting for graphic files which are still high quality but are also smaller in size. Keep in mind that incorrect use of tables can be a contributor to slow load times as well.

Improperly-used tables are diagnosed by connecting to a website and seeing no content for quite some time, until suddenly, it all appears at once. If you create one table containing your entire sales letter, you will see this happen.

A better way to go is to take advantage of ‘cascading style sheets’ or CSS, a novel method where content is separated from structure. It uses fewer (say, 2 or 3) areas at the beginning of a page to display content which keeps a customer busy reading; he or she hardly notices as the page’s remaining elements are loading.

2. Design your website so it is compatible with (and thus looks good on) as many sizes and resolutions of monitors as possible.

Not everyone has upgraded their 15-inch monitors to 24-inch wide-screen monsters! Keep in mind that display resolutions vary widely, and while some web surfers use 1280 by 1024 resolution, some people still use 800 by 600.

Internet shoppers using smaller and low-resolution computer screens will be unable to view across your entire web page if you use fixed pixels in your website design. Understandably, having to scroll horizontally just to see the whole page while browsing might irritate the shopper, and that really is not conducive to your making a sale!

3. Make your site easy on the eyes.

Are you using easily-readable, standard, and readily-available fonts and font sizes? The eyes get much more tired reading from a computer screen than from a printed page.

Here, much can be learned from direct mail marketers. They almost exclusively use 12 point courier font because it’s easy to read. As far as font availability, if you use a font that’s not available on the reader’s computer, the default font will be substituted and it may not look like you want it to.

One online method is to use a script font for signatures, but this can be a problem is the font isn’t available to the website visitor. A better plan is to use a scanned image of your actual signature.

Long passages of text should be broken up into smaller paragraphs and shorter sentences. Use plenty of white space because a lot of text without vertical space is unpleasant to the reader. Place the fine print in the required parts of your website that you hope no one visits.

Use the 3 methods described above on your sales website. Online shoppers will find your site easier to view, and you will be pleasantly surprised by how many of them actually end up making a purchase!

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