HSG Consulting - Personalized Solutions for Business Growing Pains

Some sketchy notes I took on the Website conversions session given by Ross Johnson

1. Website goals – most sell something

• Anytime you’re creating a website you’re creating a domain name
  • Your website’s calling card
  • Should be able to remember it after saying it 2 to 3 times
  • Simple, unique, easy to remember
  • Dot com is preferred if possible

• Your site goal should include something unique
• Print advertising – use unique url
• Facebook has a way to see tell you how many people go to your site
• Direct traffic is a good way to see if your domain name is good or not
• PPC – Google adwords to drive traffic
• Creating something unique, funny that will cause the viral spread of your website and get traffic to your site
• Offline promotions -
  • Public relations – Press Releases. Even locally is good for this
  • Radio
  • Direct mailing – do some sort of tracking to see if is working

2. Design

• Everyone has different tastes. If targeting sites for specific demographic pick a look that works for them. Pictures of people in that age/demographic group
• Test your website – Flash testing – 2-3 seconds flashed on screen, ask people what they remembered from site
• Copy – content on site (see talk from Ross earlier)
  • Headline that sums up entire page
  • Supportive copy
  • Bullets are better!
  • Language semantics – target market concerns for the terms/words you use
  • Call to Action – tell your users exactly what you want them to do!

• Don’t use tables for full usability – screen readers don’t work with tables
• Images or flash content should have alternate text
• Download LYNX browser – this is a text only browser so you can see how your site renders
• Firefox plug-in- Fangs(spelling?) – to have it render your site as a screen reader would see it.
• Each page should have main goal – and an actionable outcome that is obvious. Narrow user decision down to Yes or No -
• Design for the top 300 pixels – above the fold
• Don’t code to the larger screens out there – most people have multiple screens open at one time anyway and won’t see your content

3. Usability testing of your site

• Simple, watch them as they work

4. Fills customer’s need

• Price mentioned on site allows to pre-qualify customers on the cost

5. Track your site

• • Google.com/analytics – free service for your site
    Where people are coming from, what pages they go to, what page they come in and what page they leave
  • • Tells you where your traffic is
  • Feedburner – for Blogs – how many people are subscribed to your RSS feed

6. Linking to other sites

• Open in separate window or new tab
• Lose people when does not open in new window

This entry was posted on Saturday, October 27th, 2007 at 5:19 pm and is filed under Discussion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.