Denver, Colorado – A website is a prerequisite to doing business. An effective website is a prerequisite to realizing a return. If you want to attract, retain and convert visitors into customers, your site must be designed to achieve those ends from the start. To do that, you have to think like a visitor — and design your site to function the way a visitor would want it to function.

Simple Navigation – Keep your navigation simple. Use a single menu bar along the left margin or top edge. That’s where most visitors will expect to find it. Secondary pull-down menus don’t work well on mobile devices so use menus on secondary pages instead – and try to work some keywords into your links.

The 3-Click Trick – Internet users are in a hurry. They either quickly get to news they can use or they quickly cruise to another site. Take the time to think through how visitors will be likely to use your site and map the site to allow them to get to any page in no more than 3 clicks. If your site is very complex or you have many products to offer, the closer you can get to 3 clicks, the more your visitors will like it.

Limit Searches – Search bars are one of visitors’ favorite features, a way to cut to the chase and go directly to the product or service they want to know about. Just make sure that your search bar only searches your web pages, not the whole Internet. Letting your visitor search outside your pages is one of the quickest ways we know to lose a visitor!

Forget Flash – Flash, everybody’s favorite way to incorporate motion and graphics into a website, has been outmoded — at least as far as mobile applications are concerned. Now HTML 5 offers much greater, more mobile-friendly capabilities.

Call Visitors to Action – Calling a visitor to action (click here, fill in that, etc.) is one of the best ways to direct them to pages you want them to visit. Answering the call to action should take the visitor to a landing page that asks for contact information in return for content — information you can use to convert visitors into leads.

Stay Relevant – Anticipate the information visitors to your site are most looking for and give it to them clearly, concisely and, to the extent that you can, cleverly. Addressing the questions at your visitors’ top of mind not only makes your site more valuable to them but also provides a great opportunity to work in more keywords.

Be Patient – It takes time for a website to become productive but, if it’s designed with the user in mind, it will. Build it – and promote it — and they will come.

If you would like more traffic to your website, please contact us, we can help.