Effective Website Design: How to Turn a Visitor Into a Customer (Part One)

One of the biggest challenges of a business website is how to turn a visitor into a customer. You only have a few seconds to grab the attention of your prospect, keep it long enough to build your credibility, and make them choose you over your competition. How do we convert these potential customers into a sale?

You do it with effective website design.

Your website design determines whether they like you, and whether they want to do business with you. It’s as simple as that. If you can build enough interest, there will be a tipping point that turns them from visitor into a customer. I am going to share with you some effective website design elements that will deliver those customers. This article is part one.

Website Branding

When I sit down with a client who wants to build a website for their business, the first thing I ask them is if they have a logo. Why? Because this is a good starting point to see if they have created any kind of branding for their business. What’s a brand? It’s a visual element (or a group of elements) that helps your target market identify you from your competition. When the market sees your brand, they think of you. For example: When you think of the insurance giant Aflac, what comes to mind? The duck, right? You might also think of their logo with its specific font, specific shade of blue, and of course, the duck with the orange beak. Your website should be no different. When someone lands on your home page, you need to arrest them with a very distinct look and feel that sets you apart from your competition.

A recent example of this is from a client’s website we just launched a month ago. Even though he had been in the label business since 1995, he had absolutely no branding; just a really lame logo with no colors, and a lousy font. As I started researching the competition, I noticed that most of his competitors’ websites also had terrible branding (which made me happy), and were rather impersonal. Something I noticed about my client was that he had only one leg (he had lost it the previous summer from diabetes). So, I went for broke and said, “Let’s make you the icon of your business with your one leg”.

He loved the idea.

So, I took a picture of him with his one leg, and put it up on the site. I wrote a few paragraphs with the heading, “A Leg Up on the Competition”. It was written from his point-of-view. We had him talk about losing his leg, and not being discouraged about it. I then had him urge people to donate to the American Diabetes Association. Instant personality and branding. It was real, and real engaging. After doing some search engine optimization for his website, we now have it in the top 10 (nationally) for the search term, “labels for bottles” on Google. He is starting to get some good feedback from his site even though it has only been launched a few months.

By creating a good brand for your company up-front, you’ll have a much easier time building a website that connects with your intended audience. Good branding will set you apart from your competition, and make your potential customers choose you to do business with instead of other websites.

There are three other elements to capturing visitors to your website, and turning them into customers. I will be writing parts 2-4 for EzineArticles.com in the coming months, but if you would like to read about these three other elements now, you can visit my original article on the subject of effective website design (link shown below).