Designing a Website for Your Targeted Audience
When designing a website, many people tend to get caught up in the fun of trying different designs. It is important to remember that when you design a website, you are designing it for a particular audience. The fact is that the design you choose for your website should reflect your target audience. A website that does not relate to their audiences desires will not see an increase in sales.
When designing a website, the first thing you have to do is define your target audience. Websites are about communication; therefore, you have to determine who you are communicating to. For instance, will your audience consist mainly of men, women, a certain age group, a certain ethnicity…etc? You have to determine why they are coming to site and what they are looking for. Targeting a wide range of people may increase website traffic, but not sales.
You also have to think about the product. For instance, a man surfing the net will not be going to sites advertising womens make up. An elderly person will not go to a site selling acne medication. The idea is to attract shoppers who are looking for your specific product or service.
Once you have identified your target audience, you need to create the right look that will encourage them to make a purchase. This includes the appropriate graphics, advertising and promotional materials, and relevant content that they will find appealing. You also have to consider ease of navigation. If your audience is not that computer savvy, having an easy to navigate website will be beneficial.
Marketing techniques must be considered when designing a website. For instance, if you are selling wine, are you targeting experts in the wine industry or the general public? If you are targeting experts, you do not want to dumb down the site. Experts will have a wealth of technical knowledge regarding the wine industry and the wine itself, so you should present a marketing design that speaks on their level of expertise. Another example to consider is if you are selling a line of womens clothing. You have to design the website based on the type of women purchasing the clothes. For instance, are you selling casual wear, maternity clothes, or professional clothing for the office? Your website will deliver either a professional, relaxed, or family orientated design. Your content and advertising will need to centre on the type of environment the clothing will be worn in. All of these details will help you pick the most appropriate design.
Other design aspects you have to consider include: the most appropriate graphics and sounds, keywords that will reach your target audience, the type of information you will provide that is both relevant to the customer and the business philosophy. As well, you must consider the level of audience interaction that will be expected. This can include discussion forums, entering contests, completing surveys, providing feedback…etc.
Understanding your audience and their needs is essential to creating and maintaining a successful business website. It is important to remember that you may not get a perfect design on the first try. You will probably have to make some minor adjustments. The key point to remember is that your site should be built around your customer, and not your own personal preferences. As well, you may receive feedback from visitors regarding your website which will allow you to fine tune the design.
Designing a website with the customer needs and desires in mind is a critical part of running a successful business. Ultimately, whether one is designing a website for a business, or creating websites for their clients, the design of a website is blended with the business marketing concept.
Learn How Establishing An E-Commerce Website Can Speed Up Your Sales!
Do you currently own your own retail business? Is your business a brick-and-mortar business and you aren’t yet convinced this ‘e-Commerce Website Development’ trend is the way to go for your business? Since its inception in the 1970s and complete social and governmental acceptance in the late 1990s, implementing e-Commerce website development to your existing retail business can benefit as an additional revenue generator. In fact, implementing e-Commerce website development to your existing retail business can benefit as an additional revenue steam in addition to helping you move closeout, unwanted and unsold merchandise.
At this point in time it is hard to even imagine a world without E-Commerce. The way it has revolutionalized how we do business is something worth celebrating. In this era of now-a-days that can simply be described as social, e-commerce has created convenience that cannot be matched.
Basically, you need an online presence and typically this means through e-Commerce web site development. Keep in mind, your web site acts as your online ‘store front’ for your image and the goods and/or services you are attempting to market and sell online. Consumers are browsers. Consumers spend hours researching and browsing online before they make their purchase. Be sure your online store front converts these browsers into buyers.
Many smaller businesses are anxious about supporting online payments and transactions. You really can’t ask a consumer to mail you a check or money order these days. Bottom line is you just need to become comfortable with online payment processing and transactions because you will miss a great amount of sales and revenue if you opt not to offer this.
Don’t be so concerned about fancy graphics, videos and music. The average consumer doesn’t wait for these things to download. If you do post images of your products make sure they’re optimized for rapid download. Consumers have short attention spans; they will not wait more than seconds for an image to download without moving on. Furthermore, the more text-rich your e-Commerce website development is, the more search engine optimization you will achieve. Search engine optimization is the process of improving the volume and/or quality of traffic to your web site with the use of keywords that are picked up from search engine search inquiries.
Site navigation is very important as well. Simple site navigation recommendations such as left-side search bar, drop down menus, easy to use links, FAQ section and relevant menu bars are all important. Relevant and recommended pages to link to are “About Us”, “FAQs”, “Contact Us”; and “Privacy Policy”. The obvious pages apart from these listed would be your products and/or services. If your product is clothes, break the menu links down to women, men, children, and current sales. If your product is tires, break the menu down into categories of tires that the tire consumer would use.
Top 10 Reasons To Have An E-Commerce Site
Most people have opted to go to the internet to make a living and others have made millions from it. But the secret to this kind of success is not easy to come by. The first thing that you should do is to have an eCommerce site that sells. If you cannot sell your products and services online to the internet folk you cannot succeed in driving the revenue that you require. It’s that simple. If you are unconvinced by why you need a website that works then perhaps these reasons will give you a clearer picture.
1. An e-consulting site will reach out to millions of people. It creates a virtual presence of you and your company and with enough effort you could start making money in no time. It is one of those marketing tools that have proved to be tremendously successful with time.
2. It eases the process of you reaching the masses that you want. In the physical there is little you can do but in a world where one place becomes a meeting place for hundreds of people, it becomes easier for you.
3. Reduce processing costs by $25 to $75 for each paperless order. E-Commerce consulting firms had determined that the average amount saved per transaction when making the change from brick-and-mortar to online and paperless, is between $25.00 and $75.00.
4. Reduce collaboration costs. Collaboration costs are costs associated with doing business. Employees, pens, paper, printers, faxing, heating, cooling, bottled water, phone systems and so many other collaboration costs will be saved once you establish your e-commerce site.
5. Efficiency must be the main objective for any business entity, as it determines the load of work one can offer to the customers and how fast the work is done. All these can be assured when one has an e-commerce site as it is fast in processing any kind of transactions in minutes rather than in the hours in the life. This in the long run adds to ones revenue stream as transactions take less time.
6. By encouraging transactions through your web site, you will obtain and be able to save all your customers’ information electronically, thus making it easier to reuse and analyze for target demographic purposes. You can send out reminder emails for upcoming sales, you can send out special service offers, you can email coupons but mainly you will be able to keep in touch with these customers and remind them of your business often.
7. Savings are improved by up to 10% when the activity of purchasing goods and services is done indirectly
8. The internet allows you to target a huge customer base. A brick-and-mortar store only allows you to target customers in the immediate area and assumes people have time to visit your business. Consumers are browsing, researching and shopping online 24 hours every day.
9. Transactions that are done online need no paper and are cheaper to carry out. This of course means you get to save, no matter how little the expense might have been. It is still saving nonetheless.
10. Sales online completely eliminate paper processing, printing and in some cases, shipping.
All in all it can be agreed that the internet has done so much to improve our lives and tapping into this goldmine will give you an advantage. That is why having an e-commerce consulting website is so important if you want to make any real profits.
The Evolution of E-Commerce
E to stand for electronic, eCommerce has been on a journey of development and growth since the 70′s. Electronic Data Interchange, or in short EDI is the term that has taken the place of the eCommerce of yesteryears. Back then it meant eBanking but not any more. Now it means having ATMs and a more advanced system of data exchange where credit card details can be passed over the internet.
In the 1990s, saw the first e-commerce purchase which was cars take place online. At some point e-commerce was adopting the name of online trading; something that has not changed so much today. At around this time the internet was not everyone’s cup of tea as it was just referred to as another development in technology that people were oblivious about. They only took it seriously at around 1994. Having in mind some had already started purchasing cars online long before that, such people were referred to as technologically savvy.
This delayed period may be attributed to a number of factors. One of them is the fact that the governments lacked the enthusiasm to support such kind of transactions over the internet. Faith was lacking and that meant there was little support. As the years advanced into the 1994 and 1995, it was established that there was security in those types of transactions and that it was generally safe. In essence, there was nothing wrong with using credit cards to shop online.
A few e-Commerce strategy landmarks occurred in 1994 when Pizza Hut offered online ordering via its webpage and Netscape released Mozilla. A year later in 1995, Jeff Bezos launched Amazon. Additionally in 1995, the first 24-hour radio stations started broadcasting and the well-known eBay was introduced to the Internet under the name Auction Web.
Gradually over the years, e-Commerce strategy has gone from being known only by the Internet savvy to being fully recognized by the average person. When one heard ‘B2B’ they eventually recognized that to mean business-to-business and could assume it was referring to the concept of e-Commerce. Retailers became e-tailers and receipts from the purchase of products or services were widely accepted via emails from the seller or provider. Email (Electronic Mail), instant messaging, online shopping and order tracking, domestic and international payment systems, shopping carts, and electronic tickets have all become part of our daily vocabulary. In today’s business world, there really is no option to have an internet presence, this is how fully evolved e-commerce has become.
In the recent times the government has gotten involved in the e-commerce, thus making the consumer not only comfortable, but also willing to share private information, financial, personal, and banking information over the internet. Most businesses have resulted in going online in transacting their businesses. The e-commerce strategy has really helped people to start their own business entity without any much expense. Since there is no overhead charges, for example, rent, leasing of studio, fax machine and printers. If one got the right e-commerce strategy one can successful run his business proficiently online.
Steps To Successful SEO
Many Internet professionals are intently curious about search engine optimization (SEO). But how exactly is a page optimized for SEO? There are certain benchmarks that business can follow to achieve high search engine results page ranking (SERPs) and get the targeted traffic they want. These steps will be discussed in detail.
The initial step to SEO success is to create a strong webpage. This does not mean you must fill it with irrelevant features, widgets, feeds and more. Instead, a page is considered strong when it is filled with original, quality content. When speaking of originality it means that it is not plagiarized, and the meaning of quality relates to incorporating something new. Plainly stated, when a search engine has numerous articles on walking dogs, preference begins to go to articles with specific topics, such as instructions for walking certain breeds, or walking a dog on a hot day. It is important to realize that if something has been posted time and time again on the Internet, then it is not regarded to as special.
Second, SEO pages are optimized for keywords in the right locations. First, the targeted keywords must be accurately positioned. Targeted keywords and phrases should be in the page title (not the site title), which is normally marked in HTML with the tag. Also, targeted keywords should be in the actual URL of the page (e.g. www.stuff.com/Targeted_Keywords.html). Finally, the target keywords are generally recommended to be in the first paragraph and last sentence of content. Long-tail keywords, aka related keywords, should be in the article body and separated by paragraph. What this entire process says to a search engine bot is, This article is about X because the URL, page title, introductory paragraph and conclusion say it is. But X and A, B, C, D are related because they appear to be sub-topics of X. Index this article for X and A, B, C, D under X.
The Final step is to ensure that you have exceptional backlinks (a link placed on another page which directs a researcher onto your page. SEO relies heavily on backlinks, so it is important to have your anchored on a page with minimal other links and that is highly regarded by search engines, such as Google PageRank.
SEO is not a complex idea, but its practices use thousands of dollars each year as companies teach marketers to use SEO and buy backlinks. But one thing is for sure, the SEO industry is not going away soon.
