5 Keys to Creating a Website that Sells

March 7, 2017 Teresa Clark

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Your business website is your storefront, your business card, and your most significant marketing tactic all rolled into one. How your website affects your visitors and customers is essential to your success. Provide a memorable experience, and customers are sure to return time and time again. Let’s take a look at five keys to creating a website that sells.

Make your website interactive – As the Internet continues to grow and evolve, it’s becoming more important to create a community around your business. To accomplish this, you want to engage your visitors and customers. This can be accomplished a number of ways. You can:

Provide a forum
Post surveys and polls
Offer a blog and inspire comments and feedback
Host contests and sweepstakes

Make sure your website provides value – People go online for many reasons, including to research a potential purchase, to seek solutions for a problem, and to be entertained. If your website provides all three – products, information, and entertainment – then you’re in tiptop shape. Consider publishing these types of content on your website to provide value for your customers:

How-to articles, videos, and audio
Tips articles, videos, and audio
Case studies
Workbooks and reports
Interviews with experts
Product reviews

Make sure your website is easy to navigate – It takes a visitor about 20 seconds to make a decision about whether they’re going to stay on your website or click away. If your site is organized well with information that is easy to find, then people are more likely to hang out. And the longer they stay on your site, the more likely they are to make a purchase or to return again. To make your site easy to navigate consider:

Keeping your site simple.
Keeping your pages uniform with the same options and appearance.
Organizing your content by topic for easier access.
Offering a search function.
Testing your website’s appearance on different browsers to make sure every visitor has a good experience.

Make your website easy on the eyes – Have you ever visited a website where the text was so small or the colors so incompatible that you couldn’t read the content? Readability is critical to a selling website. Analyze your own site and make sure:

Your colors are pleasing to the eyes.
Your graphics aren’t distracting.
You keep formatting like underlining, bold, and italics to a minimum.
The spacing between sentences and paragraphs is adequate.
The font size is large enough for people to read, and the font is easy to read.

Give a soft sell – People expect to be sold to, and they’re even looking for it. But instead of hitting website visitors with a hard sell, provide information, solve their problems, and show them the benefits of your products or services. They’ll be much more receptive and appreciative.

Creating a website that sells requires a structured approach and a desire to create the best experience possible for your visitors. Once you’ve created your website, consider testing it and asking associates, friends, and family for their opinion.