If a page on your website doesn’t load in about 8 seconds, you could be losing 30% of your site’s visitors. 30% of potential customers are lost when they get impatient and leave, likely not to return.

One cause of slow-loading pages is over-sized images. Lots of large images on a page means slower load times.

But, if you optimize each image to load as quickly as possible you dramatically reduce load times, keeping visitors at your website.

Let’s review why optimization is important:

1. What is Optimization?
2. Practical Tips

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Site Architecture, sometimes called Website Information Architecture, is part of the structure of links in a website.

The links on a Web page create a parent/child relationship between the two pages where the source page is the parent and the destination page is the child.

Among the benefits of having good site architecture are increased crawlability (more indexed pages), better usability, and better search engine rankings.

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In our third installment on email marketing we explore design elements for effective email marketing campaigns. We previously talked about the advantages of email marketing, list building strategies, and developing your email marketing plan. Now it is time to focus on the design of your email.

While content may be king, good design ensures your content will be seen. The objective is to design emails that are opened and acted upon. A well designed email attracts the recipient’s interest, holds their attention and stimulates action. It can also enhance your company’s image.

So What is “Good” Design?

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Choosing the right colors is pivotal for the success of your eCommerce site.

We all have emotional responses to color – many of these these reactions are defined by our culture from the day we were born.  Pink for a baby girl and blue for a baby boy.  Bad guys wear black and good guys wear white.

Let’s explore how the use of color relates to eCommerce using a Western view of color symbolism. Each color of the spectrum is filled with symbolism and within each color the different tints and shades have many of their own associations.

Let’s take a look at where colors are used, and why.

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A call to action encourages visitors to do something specific. An optimized call to action will increase your conversion rates.

“Buy Now,” “Get our Newsletter,” “Join the Community” are all calls to action. Each call to action gives clear direction to visitors and let them know the purpose behind the page they are going to see.

How do I Optimize my Call to Action?

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Custom buttons add flavor and increase the impact of your site. But, firing up a graphics editor just to change some text gets old fast.

Here’s how to make custom buttons which will reduce load times and give you the ability to easily edit each button text individually.

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We know that persuasion works. We’ve all been talked into doing something that we weren’t sure about only a moment ago. Let’s take what we’ve learned in ‘real life’ and apply the four most common persuasion techniques to web design.

Reciprocity – that nagging feeling that once you’ve been given something, you’re obligated to give something back. This tactic is used with free gifts all the time – give away a freebee and a customer becomes more likely to return the ‘favor’ with their business and/or trust. Think about swapping a freebee for something as simple as an email address – it’s free and both parties benefit! (more…)

Ever been to a site where it was so easy to find what you were looking for that it seemed to be reading your mind ?

You needed a pair of socks and a belt, to check the shipping policy, to check affiliate possibilities, or to gather some information about the rare llama yarn that was used in those socks – and it was all there, right at your fingertips, no hassle.

If so, you’ve experienced invisible navigation – the kind you don’t notice, but takes you everywhere you want to go, right away!

Chances are good that any site that fits this description employed many of the different types of navigation explained below.

Previously, I’ve offered Tips for Simple Navigation and Types of Navigation.  Here I’ll be describing the Styles of Navigation. (more…)

There are three basic types of navigation: hierarchical, site wide, and locally determined.

Each of these types of navigation can be represented in a tree structure (see figures).  The navigation trees can be traversed vertically or horizontally by following the links (lines) between the elements.

In an earlier post, I offered Tips for Simple Navigation.  Here I’ll describe the three types of navigation.

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The goal: don’t make your visitors think.

The plan: create a navigational system that makes it simple and intuitive to find everything on your site.

If you are in the process of building a new navigational structure for your site, or looking for some ideas to improve your site’s current information architecture, take a look at the best practices below to reduce the amount of thinking you make your visitors do.

You Are Here

Provide your visitors with a “You Are Here” by making it obvious where they are on your site.

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