Every visitor to your website is a potential customer, and whether a “conversion” on your site equals a filled out Contact Us form or a completed online purchase, more conversions equals more business.  So how can you increase conversions on your website? Here are 5 suggestions to try:

1. Make It Clear.
Is your call-to-action getting lost in the clutter of your website?  Make sure that the button or link that leads customers along the path to conversion is one of the most prominent elements on your pages. Try to eliminate distracting bright colors that should be reserved for your call-to-action. Avoid clutter – white space is your friend.  Make sure your call-to-action is the boldest and most attention-grabbing element of your page design.

2. Put It Above the Fold
“Above the Fold” is a phrase that is taken from the newspaper world referring to the valuable, headline news real estate found above the fold of the newspaper.  In web-speak, this refers to the space on a web page that is viewable without having to scroll.  Keeping your call-to-action above the fold helps to ensure that everyone will see it.

3. Red Doesn’t Always Mean Stop
Conventional design wisdom says that the color red sends the message “stop” to viewers.  But Performable.com decided to test that theory on their site by changing their green call-to-action button into a red one.  Conversions on the red button were 21% higher!  That kind of increase warrants at least a test on your own site.

4. If It Moves, It Grabs Attention
This one is a little trickier, since you want to avoid overdoing the spinning, blinking lights (see item #1). However, a subtle bit of movement or animation added to your call-to-action (or somewhere close-by) can help draw your customers’ eyes.

5. Add Human Interest – with Photos of Real People
Having more photos of faces (particularly smiling) is a consistently successful way of catching your visitors’ attention and increasing conversions.  Many different sites have tried adding images of people with measurable success.  For instance, MedaliaArt.com added photos of artists in place of photos of their paintings and made double the amount of sales. CalyxFlowers.com tested images of people with their flowers.  In their test, visitors who saw images with people were 14% more likely to add something to their shopping cart.

Every website communicates information to users through text. Headlines grab our attention while cluing us into what the following paragraph is about. Supporting text tells us a story about a good or service being offered, and why we can’t live without it. Given the weighty job that text performs on a website, it makes sense to take care in sculpting its appearance. The following is a quick walkthrough of the different tweaks that web designers (and do-it-yourself website updaters) can use to add readability and impact to website text.

Use an Appropriate Line Length

Paperback books, magazines and newspapers all have distinct column sizes for text to live in. On the outside of those columns is negative white space called a margin that gives your eyes a place to rest while reading from line to line. Having an overly wide text column can create fatigue on the reader as there is not ample space to rest. Conversely, having very narrow text columns also makes sentences seem confusing as the reader has to jump from line to line constantly. Determining an optimal line length for text is more of an art form than a science, and usually is a trial and error process. However, keep in mind that in general the larger the typeface (or font), the smaller you want your number of characters per line to be.

Choose the Right Font Family

Different typefaces (fonts) carry meaning, and should be picked with care. While sans-serif fonts are easier to read on screen, they may not be the best choice for your company’s message. Font choice should try to match your already established branding look and feel, along with effectively displaying your headlines, sub headlines, body text and call outs effectively. Learn more about font choice.

Use a Readable Font Size

The standard font size for print is 16 pixels (1em) which seems large when compared to most websites where 12px text seems to be the norm. It is important to embrace your audience and make sure that your website text is easily legible for them. An older audience (age 40+) will require and expect a larger font size than a younger demographic.  Do a little research into our visitors to make sure you are accommodating their needs. For general body copy guidelines, 10px is too small for most users to read,while 24px seems more like a headline.

Control Line Height

Line height is the vertical space in between lines of words. Line height is usually referred to as leading, a term from actual printing presses where slabs of lead were inserted in between sentences to set the height. Line height aids in readability by having paragraphs, headlines, and sub headlines grouped together with space.

Use Contrasting Colors

Contrast is key to having text stand out and be easy to read. Traditionally, black text on a white background has been seen as the highest, and thus best level of contrast. However, screens are different from printed paper, as they create light and thus seem much brighter and more contrasted. A newer trend is to use a dark grey color on a white background to lessen the stark contrast. Whatever color palette your work from, it is important to have contrasting colors so that all users can see and read your text, including users with old, low-contrast monitors, or visitors with vision impairments like color-blindness.

Starting a new design project can sometimes be a little intimidating.  Here are some tips to help take the mystery out of one of the most important team members on your project and make sure you get the most out of their experience and expertise.

Who’s In Charge?

Before the initial design meeting, your company should appoint one person in charge of all communications with the designer.  Having one gatekeeper to funnel all the opinions of your company’s decision makers saves a lot of time and production hours.

One danger: make sure  you don’t have too many final decision makers! You’re familiar with the term “too many cooks in the kitchen”? The same applies when it comes to websites.  Get everyone’s input during the proposal phase on the major functional components and goals of the website, then assign the handful of people who will approve the design and content.

Be Prepared

While this may seem obvious to you, make sure that your designer has a clear understanding of your business, and what exactly you want the website to accomplish.  The more a designer knows about your business and goals, the better results they can deliver. The following is a list of very common questions that are asked at initial design meetings, and are important to focus a website’s direction:

Business Info

• What are your main products or services?
• Are you national or international? Or do you focus locally?
• How is your company perceived? Is this accurate? Do we need to correct an inaccurate customer perception?
• How many employees are in your company?
• What words or phrases best represent your company?

Target Market

• Who is your target market?
• What state / country / city is your target market?
• What is your brand image with your target market?
• Are you targeting different customers with your website than you traditionally serve offline?

Competition

• Who are you major competitors?
• What sets you apart (competitive advantage / unique selling proposition)?
• Are your offline competitors different than the major online competition?

Marketing Materials

If you have any marketing materials like business cards, brochures or pamphlets, make sure your designer sees them. Having an established visual identity is a great starting place if you want to continue with the same look, or change it completely.

Additionally, does your company have an established brand style sheet with defined colors and usage rules for your logo, tagline and trademarked images?

Designs You Like

Look around at other websites that you feel are well designed or express a company image similar to your own. Having a common visual to discuss and dissect will help the designer understand your thoughts and style. Think of words like clean, minimalist, edgy, grungy, regal, serious, etc… that describe your company or how you want your company to be portrayed online.

Designs You Hate

Is there a color that you cannot stand and should never appear on your website? Are glossy buttons too gimmicky for your company? Let your designer know of anything that should absolutely not be on your website along with websites that you find awful. Having an idea of what you do not like also gives a window into directions that should be avoided. But always remember, your website is not for you, but for your target market.

While this article is not exhaustive in what will be covered in an initial design meeting, it should prepare you to discuss the basics that are needed to effectively brand your company online.

Websites are a great advertising medium, they can communicate a great deal of information along with reinforcing your company’s branding. What separates websites from more traditional print advertising mediums is their dynamic instead of static nature.

Every aspect of a print ad can be controlled from the size, paper, ink colors and medium. Take a magazine ad for example; there is a defined target market including gender, income level, education, likes, and world view that is meticulously researched and defined. The size is 11×13” on glossy paper, the ink colors are controlled to look exactly the same on the designer’s monitor as they do on paper. Once printed, the circulation lasts about a month, and every end user sees the same ad, on the same page, in the same magazine context. The whole user experience has been controlled to produce constant, reliable results.

Web sites on the other hand are dynamic and ARE changed according to the end users. The HTML code that constitutes a website can be interpreted differently by the end user’s browser. Color is dependent on monitor contrast and brightness settings, along with the operating system (not to mention CRT vs. plasma or LCD). The website’s size can be changed based on the monitor size and resolution, which can range from 800 x 600px to 1600 x 1200px. By changing browser settings, the end user can choose to disregard images, increase or decrease the text size, and block structural and functional code like Javascript or CSS. In the end, your website is a very fluid medium with a lot of potential.

Going into the web design process knowing that fluidity is the nature of the beast can save you a lot of time and frustration. An experienced web designer knows the quirks of all major browsers along with how to make your design appear similar and functional across the most popular modern browsers. We will work with you to create designs that can be flexible across different monitor sizes and resolutions along with providing colors with enough contrast to be differentiated for most users, despite differences across monitors.

One of the first lessons a skilled web designer must learn is to give up the type of absolute control a print designer enjoys.  We do this by embracing the challenge and excitement of the web’s fluidity.  As a client and website owner, it is equally important for you to understand and accept that your website is built for delivery on screen via a browser – not as a printed piece.  And while you may not have absolute control over where your text line breaks, or the spacing between your letters, the digital nature of a website gives you far more control over metrics and conversion tracking.

Not every font that is installed on your computer can be used on your website, because not everyone that views your website has the same fonts installed on their computer as you. In an effort to keep websites looking similar between different browsers and operating systems, web designers can choose from certain fonts that are “web safe” and reliable.

To make your website accessible to all users, it is highly recommended that you only use the following “web safe” fonts. To help visualize both Windows and Macintosh font renderings, I have placed the Windows version in black next to the Macintosh version in blue.

Serif

Serif fonts are one of the oldest font designs and feature serifs or “feet” to finish their strokes, like in an uppercase T. While serif fonts are regarded as easier to read in print because the serifs lead your eye across each letter, they are not recommended for website body copy. They are usually used in websites to convey authority and age, like in many newspaper and legal websites.

Web Safe Serif Fonts

Sans-Serif

Sans serif have no serifs, sans is French for without. Sans serif fonts are recognized as being easier to read on websites, and thus are the most popular choice for body copy.

Web Safe Sans-Serif Fonts

Monospace

Monospace fonts have the same exact width for each character and space, usually based on the width of the uppercase “M”. Monospace fonts are used on the web to display code snippets so that it is recognized as different from the body copy.

Web Safe Monospace Fonts

Calling Website Fonts

Through CSS, you are able to call a primary or intended font along with a substitution, and finally a font type so that your web site can display as designed even when the proper fonts are not available:

font-family: { "Times New Roman", Georgia, serif }

Translation: Display Times New Roman, if not found, then display Georgia, if not found then display the default serif font.

Here is a complete list of web safe fonts to choose from:

• Arial
• Arial Black
• Book Antiqua
• Comic Sans*
• Courier New
• Georgia
• Geneva
• Impact
• Lucida Console
• Palatino Linotype
• Tahoma
• Times New Roman
• Trebuchet MS
• Verdana

* Please note: listing Comic Sans above was in the spirit of full disclosure. NetSource’s designers do not intend to endorse the use of Comic Sans in any way…

Empty plastic bags roll through a cracked and patched pavement parking lot. Shopping carts are scattered about… some maneuvering themselves unmanned through the rows of unpopulated parking spaces of the Electronics-O-Rama. The store signage is in disarray, and the glass of the storefront is fogged and dirty. The color scheme of the decrepit building is like that of a circus tent, plastered with fliers and promotional signs made with poster-board and Sharpies. However, on the inside of this dilapidated place of business is the brightest team of individuals ever to be in customer service, and their product is one in a million. No one comes close in either quality or customer satisfaction, but few customers have even thought twice about giving them the chance to prove themselves.

Electronics-O-Rama suffers from poor perceived credibility. The surface of their business, the “visual handshake,” is lacking a quality that the competition offers, though the competition can’t offer the same quality product or service.

Just how important is perceived credibility? Many small retail establishments have faded over the years to flashier, bigger, chain retailers providing the same products with worse customer service, or in some cases worse products (and customer service). What makes Best Buy more credible than Joe’s TV’s? The answer…

Perception:

A Stanford University study found that 41.6 percent of people from a total of 2684 surveyed stated that design was of high importance when related to perceived credibility. Something interesting to note from the study is that  your users will judge a website by its design. Even though the old saying goes, “You can’t judge a book by it’s cover,” it just isn’t true for the web because the internet is so much more visually rich than books.

Layout, color, consistency, and style all play a major role in the  image you portray to your users. Your website shouldn’t just be a beautiful image, but the right one to represent your company. And while image and style are important, they aren’t the only factors that play a part in your user’s perception. You must also carefully craft your website’s content for quality information, keep your content fresh and relevant with updates, make sure it is easy to use, and keep errors in check. The study discovered looks matter; this of course varied based on the type of site, with banks and financial institutions having the most design importance and reviewers of blogs and opinion sites not placing as much emphasis on design. Users directly relate your credibility to the look of your website. Just as much as you would not have stepped foot into Electronics-O-Rama, your users won’t visit or remain on your site if it doesn’t look credible, regardless of how good you are.

The next highest area of perceived credibility was information architecture.  Your customers need to get around your site too, without becoming frustrated with poor navigation or illogical information flow. It is these things that added up to the two major slices of the credibility pie. Other important factors to remember are information focus, information accuracy, as well as usefulness and clarity. Your information needs to be straightforward, unbiased and accurate, your users can quickly discern the difference between being flashed over with fancy talk and receiving the real deal.

Ballpark

I know nothing of BallPark (image to the left), the quality of their product, or customer service. What I do know is that they appear extremely credible. Their website has a very well laid out and beautiful user interface with easy to find and understand information. It all helps to make a great first impression and this site is a breeze to explore. Take a look for yourself. If you were in the market for a similar product or service they would seem very worthy of your attention. Isn’t this the image we would all like to present? Beautiful, professional websites that make users want to stick around for more and leave lasting impressions.

Give your users engaging visuals, well crafted content, and world class usability, and you’ll have more and more of them in no time at all.

Favicons (condensed from  “favorite icons”) are extremely small, 16×16 pixel graphics that help support your online branding in a very large way. Favicons function as an important visual reminder of your brand for users both on and offline.

Favicons are Everywhere

In all modern browsers (Internet Explorer 7,8, FireFox, Opera, Safari) your single favicon is used in a myriad of places.

Address Bar - Favicons appear in every modern browser’s address bar to reinforce on each and every page that visitors are still on your site.

Tabs - When a user opens a new tab, your favicon is displayed above your page

Favorites - When a user creates a favorite of your website, your favicon is displayed next to your link in the favorite’s panel.

Favicons are not limited to online internet browsers. When a user drags your website onto their desktop, your site’s favicon becomes your offline “application” icon or short-cut.

Favicon as a Desktop Icon.

Designing Favicons

Unfortunately, favicons are difficult to design because of their extremely small size. The usual practice of taking a logo and shrinking it to fit the sixteen pixel square area can result in an undecipherable mess of colors. Instead, having a designer create a new design pixel by pixel produces a much sharper and memorable icon. Some company logos do not lend themselves readily to favicons. Logos that are just text or have large complicated graphics usually need to be interpreted into a new design that features the color scheme or style of the company.

Case Study: Connecting Point Church

Connecting Point Church's Logo

Fig. 1 - Logo shrunk to fit

Fig. 2 - Favicon Optimized

Connecting Point Church’s logo features a four point graphic that was the logical choice for their favicon. When the four point graphic was brought into Adobe Photoshop and shrunk to fit the space, pixel definition was lost with the result of a blurry image (figure 1). To achieve the optimized image (figure 2), I had to manually manipulate the pixels that made up the four curves resulting in a much sharper depiction of their graphic.

With multiple avenues of continued branding at stake, not having a favicon or having an undecipherable favicon places your website at a disadvantage. To maximize your online exposure even the smallest details like favicons should be optimized to make you look your best.

The team at NetSource Technologies is proud to announce the launch of www.sumterchamber.org, the newly redesigned website for the Sumter County Chamber of Commerce in Florida.

This beautiful website design gives the Chamber of Commerce a fresh new look, and provides a great wealth of information for website visitors. The homepage features a flash animation that showcases many wonderful photos of the area. These photos were taken by the talented residents of Sumter County, and are also used throughout the website. A large tourism section describes attractions, accommodations, dining destinations, and information about the cities within Sumter County. A directory of businesses and available properties are also listed, along with information about Sumter County and the programs that the Chamber of Commerce offers.

The majority of the website is controlled by a powerful content management system that allows the Sumter Chamber staff to update the content on the website. All of the text, photos, statistics, and property information is managed through this CMS so the most accurate and up-to-date information is always listed. Other pages, like the calendar, jobs, and business directory, are provided by ChamberMaster to make managing chamber members quick and easy.

The Sumter County Chamber of Commerce is dedicated to increasing visibility for businesses in Sumter County, Florida. They also provide networking and advertising opportunities through Chamber events like the Chamber Lunch Exchange, First Thursdays, the Annual Dinner, and Casino Night.

NetSource designers and programmers are proud to announce the launch of www.fbcocala.org, a website for the First Baptist Church of Ocala.

The redesigned website is a contemporary design that uses inviting colors and graphic promotional imagery. The centerpiece of the project is the powerful management console, which allows the staff at the First Baptist Church to fully control the organization and content of their website. Unlimited photo galleries, calandars, blogs, and standard pages can easily be added with just a click. This exclusive system transforms the website into an interactive tool that the church can use to announce service times, list special activities and events, promote mission trips, post photo galleries and so much more.  The system also includes a Flash slideshow on the Home page that church administrators can easily update by simply uploading new images.

The First Baptist Church of Ocala is a friendly community church located in Ocala, Florida. They offer both contemporary and traditional worship services for the congregation. In addition, they have several local and abroad mission trips, groups for all ages, and musical choirs.

The Netsource design team is proud to announce the launch of www.ocalagentlemanfarm.com, a new website featuring a horse property for sale in Ocala, Florida.

This beautiful and elegant website describes the Equine Estate and the 58 acres of land surrounding the home. A gallery of photos are showcased on the hompage and throughout the site to give visitors a closer look at the property. In addition to creating the website, NetSource created a Google pay-per-click campaign managed by our in house Search Engine Marketing (SEM) expert. This campaign advertises the property based on specifically targeted keywords in order to generate quality traffic to the website. The SEM campaign also involves the building of strategic in-bound links, online press releases, directory links and listings, and weekly traffic and conversion reports.

The Ocala Gentleman’s Farm is a 58 acre equestrian property for sale in Ocala, Florida. The Estate features 4 bedrooms, a grand curved foyer staircase, floor-to-ceiling cathedral windows, and a 3 car garage. At the end of a canopied Oak drive is a brick equine facility and horse stable.