• increased traffic
• more calls from prospects
• downloading an e-book
• increased newsletter subscribers
• increased facebook fans (send traffic to Fan page)

• One-time Coupons – Websites like Runa, which triggers immediate coupons to customers that are only valid for that one session. If they leave and come back the next day, the coupon will disappear.
• Simplify searches – 20% of online visitor prefer actually searches rather than searching categories. Even better, while searching, allow for autocompletes, the type you see in Google search.
• Improve your Buy Now and Add to Cart buttons. Make sure they are visible, big, and clear.
• Eliminate distractions from your checkout pages. Clarify what you need customers to do with a clear path to the final goal; purchase

• Add testimonials. Flaunt what is great about your services by showcasing what others have said about it.
• Calls to action. Be sure you tell your visitors what to. Never make them guess. Then repeat throughout the page.
• Don’t hide your phone number. We all hate hunting for the elusive phone number. How can you be trusted if you can’t pick up the phone for me?
• Move your calls to action to a prominent place. Your phone number or whatever you want folks to do, should be front and center. Maybe not literally, but it should be very visible.
• Do you need a two-column or single column layout? With a single layout you can direct the user through a series of questions as they flow down the screen. These are usually called Squeeze pages.
• Headlines. Make them bigger and more prominent so your users can separate content.

What ways do ensure conversions?

It is true that some browsers will try to display them even if the code is not valid. What happens is the browser will make an educated guess about what the web developer tried to do. The problem is, different browsers and browser versions or different software on different platforms will not handle errors the same way.

This can result to the following:

• What you see may not render on another user’s computer.
• slow page loading time and even systems crashes
• Higher maintenance cost because it may take longer to update your website. Using internationally agreed upon codes makes maintaining and expanding your website easier even if it was initially done by someone else.
• Many visually impaired people rely on browsers with speech tools that read pages back to them. These programs cannot interpret pages very well unless they are clearly explained. In other words semantic code aids accessibility.

So even if your site ranks no.1 on Google search for your keywords today, if your page doesn’t load or makes a mangled mess, then what use that it serve? Nothing but big opportunities LOST!

How will I know if my site is properly coded?

There are a number of tools available online to validate your web codes. Among them are W3C Validation service, MarkUp Validator, Link Checker and CSS Validator. But the best way is to simply look at the code and seeing if it refers to colours, fonts or layout instead of describing what the content is.

So, we are taking additional steps in improving our website’s speed as well as our customer’s. Google suggests installing their speed tool, Page Speed, to help diagnose and suggest ways to compress the site and speed it up.  Below are the areas that Page Speed will review:

1. Browser Caching – to help with the browser by instructing it to load previously downloaded resources (images, css, html, etc.) from your local disk rather than over the network.
2. CSS compression – Removing CSS from documents, compression external CSS and removing unused.
3. JavaScript compression -  minimizing and combining javascript code.
4. Images – Optimizing and setting dimensions.

So far I’ve compressed our website’s CSS file by removing spaces and extraneous styles. The next suggestion was installing in our .htaccess file with the recommended caching code. (My next post will include this code)

“We find that Web sites have three seconds to make an impression,” said Jeff Rosenblum, co-founder and research and strategy director of Questus. “The actual usability is more important than aesthetics, but at the same time aesthetics are critical.”

37% of the respondents noted that navigation can make or break their decision to buy next to 32% who said that checkout process is important. A whopping 68% said price is a factor as well. Another factor was product descriptions and shipping options, 38% and 44% respectively.

So what are we to read from this? Well, design is a very important to a web site’s success. For e-commerce site’s just having your web site on the internet with the best prices is no longer acceptable, a design’s look and feel, navigating to products and service, shipping policies and the checkout process will all determine whether a customer feels comfortable enough to buy from you.

• http://browsershots.org/ – Test on all browsers and operating systems
• http://ipinfo.info/netrenderer/index.php – Test for Internet Explorer for Windows.
• http://www.browsrcamp.com/ - Test for Safari browser on Macs.
• http://www.opera.com/mini/demo/ – Test on Opera using the Mini Simulator
• http://mtld.mobi/emulator.php – Test if it’s ready for mobile customers.

Another option for Windows XP users is the IE
http://tredosoft.com/Multiple_IE

http://www.browsercam.com – Test on all browsers and operating systems including mobile devices but there is a fee.

It’s not imperative that the website look exactly the same on each browser, but it’s important that it renders as similarly as possible and the user experience is not hindered because they choose use a Mac or a different browser.

Except for IE6

If you still use IE6, please upgrade!

http://www.webpagesthatsuck.com/worst-web-sites-of-2008.html

One award that I’d like to mention is the “Mystery Meat” and “Metaphor Navigation.” Those titles refer to websites that insist on assuming we all know what the web designer was thinking when he/she designed it. We are supposed to know that the sign for “Back up the lift” is a metaphor for “go back to the home page.”

I urge all not to use this technique for navigation. It will ensure that users will hit the back button as quickly as you can say, “Huh?”

1. if you have an e-commerce website, you could be missing out on customer orders. The last round of spam related limits placed by AOL has disallowed many emails with generic email headers, for example, info@yourcompany.com
2. Potential customers may be trying to reach you using their e-mail server but AOL may be blocking their ISP ip address.

What can you do?

• Create an e-mail using your company domain, info@yourcompany.com, and use the POP3 accounts that come with your web host. You can download these emails to your computer, save, and archive.
• If you don’t want to switch, make sure your phone number is quite prominent on every page of your website. This should just be prerequisite for having a website though.