Is your homepage badly in need of an update? Fire up your browser and head on over to your website. Here's five crucial questions to ask yourself (and friends) about your homepage to see if it's really working for you as hard as it could be.

1. Does it grab visitors' attention in 8 seconds or less? Bored visitors probably won't stick around, and your competitors are just a Google search away!
2. Does it stimulate interest and reinforce reader's confidence that they're in the right place? What's worse than a boring website? An irrelevant one! If you sell widgets, make sure your homepage not only states clearly that you make widgets but why your widgets are better that your competitors. (Or why your services are better than your competitors')
3. Does it inspire the desire to take the action or clicking deeper towards a purchase? If you were your potential customer, would you be persuaded to do business with you based on your homepage content?
4. Is how they take action easy and obvious? Step 6 feet away from your monitor and look at the screen. Is it obvious where you want your visitors to click next? If not, you need a more obvious "call to action".
5. After they've clicked, does the next page give them satisfaction by providing exactly what they wanted how they wanted? Did you hammer home why your services or products are better than your competitors? Did you provide testimonials, assurances or guarantees to make doing business with you as risk free and comfortable as possible?

And there you have it! Critical website analysis in 30 seconds or less! I'd encourage you though to spend at least a few minutes on this task. Most of your website visitors probably enter your website through your homepage. Spending a little extra time to make sure it's doing its job of impressing your visitors can go a long way to getting more business from your website.

Is Your Website Content Up to Date?

Why wait till Spring before cleaning up your website? With a new year upon us, now is the perfect time to review your website and make sure all the information is up to date and that your content reflects any changes you may have made to your business in 2011.

Also, for Website On-Denand Clients, what better way to use up your 30 to 60 minutes of free website updating time for January that your Website On-Demand plan now comes with!

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A new (and free!) online tool is available that invites visitors to complete a quick, post-visit survey on their experience with your website and whether they found what they were looking for.

If you haven't considered adding a survey to your website in the past, I would recommend considering it now.

You should be receiving monthly analytics reports about your website which is a great starting point. However, your analytics reports can only tell you that someone came to your website. Adding in a post-visit survey is a great way to find out "why" someone came to your website. (And importantly, whether your site provided them with what they were looking for.)

To Get Started

The tool is called 4Q, and you can sign-up for it at http ://www.4qsurvey.com/ On the registration page, be sure to select 4Q Free under the product type!

Once you've signed-up and gone through all the steps of creating your survey, it will provide you with code to add to your website. Simply email that code to us and we'll help you add it to your website. (This is a free service for all Website On-Demand monthly plan clients. If you're not currently a monthly plan client, we're happy to help you with this as well, however there's a $40 installation charge.)

In Other News

We're hard at work working on the new Website On-Demand website. I haven't written much recently, but once the new website and blog are up you can count on a steady stream of news on the latest and greatest tools and strategies you can use to get the most from your Website On-Demand website!

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The Importance of a Good Call to Action

To be effective, your website must clearly state what action you want your visitors to take, whether it's buying a product in your online store, booking an appointment using your online appointment calendar, or something else which will turn them from viewers into customers. Your website needs to emphasize your goal and convince visitors to take your desired action.

Focus on Only One or Two Actions

In some cases you may have many actions that you want a user to take, but be cautious to not overwhelm your visitors - identify one or two important and distinct actions and make them the focus. The rest can simply be referenced in your content, for those users who take the time to read your site in more depth (a.k.a. the minority.) For the users who are landing on your site for the first time and are glancing around the page, be direct and clarify how each action is unique and which should be taken under what conditions. You essentially need to hold the user's hand and guide them around your site.

Selling Your Action

How do you sell your action to visitors and make them want to take it? Different techniques are appropriate depending on the type of action you're asking visitors to take. If your goal is to have users buy a product or service you should sell it to them directly - identify a problem and tell the user how your product or service fixes it and the benefits they will reap. Sometimes an incentive may be necessary to entice users into taking an action - a free entry into a gift draw, for example, or a t-shirt for donating a certain amount of money to your cause.

Making Your Button Juicy & Clickable

Once you have identified your call to action the next important step is to construct the visual element, whether it is a stylized button or a simple box of text. Four attributes to decide upon are size, position, color, and text. These attributes must all work together to communicate the action to the user.

1. Size - bigger is not always better, but in this case it usually is. Since you will only have a small number of actions, and since they're the most important aspect for your users to notice, it's ok for them to be the biggest things on the page. Having a large area for the user to click on also ensures that they won't get frustrated when they're ready to follow your action and click on the link.
   
2. Position - lead your visitor's eye to the link on which they should click and let it stand apart from the text by leaving plenty of white space around it. This ensures that the user will not only see the clickable area clearly but won't mistakenly click on an adjacent link.
   
3. Color - create a contrast between your site's regular color scheme and your call to action links. If most of your site is blue, use a red button - this makes it stand out from the rest of the page.
   
4. Text - the one attribute of a call to action element that ties the rest together is the actual text that the user will be reading. A prominent button is good, but the user will be lost without knowing exactly what happens when it's clicked upon. Surround the link with a large sentence or two about why they should be clicking, then have a couple of action words on the button itself, using urgent language, to convey what it does. "Donate Now", "Book Online", "Buy Now - Sale ends in September" are all examples of good call to action button text.

Finding a Home for Your Call to Action

Finally, once your well-thought-out call to action is ready to go, you should decide on what pages of your site are appropriate for it to appear. In most cases the answer is every page. You will usually have a sidebar next to the main content area where it can exist in almost the same spot on each page, reminding the user about the action while browsing your site and ensuring that they won't have to hunt for the button once they are ready to click.

A call to action is an important (perhaps the most important) aspect of your website and should be given careful thought. When a clear call to action is combined with techniques to bring visitors to your, it can make a significant difference in the amount of sales your website generated.

Want more tips? Check out: http://boagworld.com/design/10-techniques-for-an-effective-call-to-action

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What's a Call to Action button?

If there's one question I ask my Clients over and over again it would be this: what action do you need your visitors to take on your website in order for you to make money? These actions include:

• buying something
• signing up for a newsletter
• becoming a member
• making a donation
• and lots more.

How do visitors take those actions on your website? By clicking your Call to Action buttons - whether it be a "Buy Now" button or "Subscribe" button doesn't matter.

Several factors influence whether your visitors will act when you tell them to. These factors include your sales copy, the target audience, the nature and quality of your offer, visitors' perceptions of the economy and how clickable your Call to Action buttons are. A very simple way you can boost conversion (percentage of your visitors that take action) on your website is to make sure you're large, colorful, contrasting buttons.

What makes a good button you ask?

Here's a few features of a good button:

• Color: should be bright and contrasting. For example, on an orange website you could use green buttons - avoid buttons in colors adjacent to orange on the color wheel like yellow or red.
• Location: visitors shouldn't need to scroll to find your Buy Now button. You need to make it easy for your visitors. Put the button in an obvious location on your page.
• Language: use action verbs like Buy Now, Signup, Download, Subscribe, etc. In the book Call to Action by Bryan and Jeffrey Eisenberg, they also mention the need to reduce friction and increase urgency. For example, if a visitor is considered about privacy then telling that visitor you won't share their contact information can reduce friction. Similarly, reminding visitors near a Buy Now button that you have an amazing moneyback guarantee policy can reduce friction too. Limited time offers are a great way to increase urgency.
• Size does matter: the larger the button, the easier it is to see and click. You want your visitors to click it right?
• Margins: don't crowd the most important graphic on your website. Give your Call to Action button some room, and let it do its job.

Call to action button showcase

Check out some great buttons at leemunroe.com. Scroll down to the "Showcase of good examples of Call to Action buttons".

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Are you waiting for your website visitors to contact you? Stop waiting and ask that they contact you! Deciding in advance what you want your website visitors to do on every page and then persuading them to do so should happen for each page of your website! Here's a few tips to help you along:

1. Don't be afraid to use your website to tell your visitors what you want them to do! Having visitors see your website and contact you is the primary purpose of your website - telling them to do so is essential.
2. Make it easy for your website visitors to contact you - increase the size of your phone number in the top left corner, and tell them to call you today/now/immediately in order to have a warm, caring person talk to them like a human being. I apologize for the long sentence.
3. Remove or reduce the amount of homepage devoted to your company/team/bio information. It's true that people do business with people, but the most important person on your website is the visitor and they tend to read about solutions to their problems. Visitors like to see content that talks about them and their problems. Devote as much space as possible on your homepage to the visitor's potential problems/concerns/needs, convince them that your services are the best solution and then make it easy for them to contact you.

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