BHS Web Design – Toronto Web Design Blog

Toronto Web design companies are experts at helping clients increase their online sales.  Just like with a physical store, marketing is critical in order to drive customers to a website in order to increase the likelihood of making more sales.  Take a look at these ways you can boost sales by making small adjustments to your website.

You should start out by utilizing a unique sales message and weave that into your website design.  Make your web design centered around creating a personal relationship between your company and each visitor who logs on.  If you can provide visitors with a feeling of camaraderie and friendship as a part of your marketing approach, they’ll be more likely to tell a friend.  As you know, word of mouth can be a useful tool in driving sales in the upward direction.  So make your conversations personal and directed toward each individual instead of to a group when drafting a sales pitch to be placed on your website.

Testimonials are another useful tool to utilize as a part of your website design.  While many will publish the positive comments, another approach will be to publish a few of the negative comments as well to make things more convincing.  Keep in mind that no matter which way you go, the whole point here is to show that others are buying your products as well.  Because many in our society are more followers than leaders, it will be easier to jump on the bandwagon and follow the crowd if visitors believe others are buying your products too.

Another tip that Toronto web design companies know is the importance of using visual images wisely.  Not each person will read every word of text that is included as apart of your website design, but most, if not all, will look at the images.

Offering special bonuses to accompany any purchases is another trick that can increase sales of your products.  When a prospective customer sees something that says “two for the price of one” or that they will “receive a free gift valued at…” it encourages them to buy.

Finally, be sure to include a space in your website design where you directly ask for the business!  Be sure to make it clear how a customer can purchase your products (a “buy now” button is a great option).

When you think about website design, it is important to keep the user in mind.  These visitors are, after all, the heartbeat of your website and you want them to feel welcomed and encouraged to buy when they log on to your website.  Ask any Toronto web design company and they can attest to seeing plenty of websites that have good products but suffer because of poor design.

Good design is about not only presenting a professional and polished image for your online company.  Website design that is quality also looks at layout design, accessibility design, as well as user experience design.  This all goes hand in hand with graphic design, which is what most focus on solely.

Take a look at the checklist below to see if you are on track with your website design:

1) Background music
This is a no-no for your website unless you are promoting a website that is related to music.  Looping music is one of the biggest reasons that people will exit a website.  The best you can hope for is that someone will turn off their speakers if they don’t want to hear your music, but the likelihood is that they will simply log off and visit another website where music isn’t continuously playing.  Also, this is a nightmare for those who are viewing your website on a dial-up connection because of the load time issues it causes.

2) Text size that is too large or small
Remember, web design is about more than just graphics; you must also consider the user accessibility factor.  Visitors should be able to read the text on your website without needing to squint or pick up a magnifying glass.  Conversely, extra large font can be similarly frustrating for users.  These small details can cost you tons of sales.

3) Popup windows
These are one of the most annoying display items that many visitors complain about when visiting a website.  Most people instinctively close out a popup each time it comes on the screen or they have a popup blocker installed, which prevents it from being seen anyway.

In conclusion, please be reminded that your online company is dependent heavily on a website design that is conducive to creating happy and satisfied customers who will return to your website and do business with your company!

Ask any Toronto website design company and they will tell you that no one designs a website without the hope that there will be frequent visitors.  When it comes to driving traffic to a website, Google, MSN and Yahoo, plus other major search engines, must come up in the conversation.  For this reason it is important to be mindful of how easily these search engines will find your website it you plan on increasing traffic to your website.

With web design you must know that any major search engine will use robots or crawlers as a way of indexing websites to come up with website page rankings.  Obviously the higher your website is in the rankings the more likely you are to receive more visitors to your website.  And the more links you have the better you are at achieving a higher ranking and this helps you with the databases and makes your website easier to find.

So what do you do if you want to make your website design the most friendly for those all important search engine robots and crawlers?  Well, one of the first things you should do is to stay away from using any frames in your website design.  Believe it or not, the use of frames in your web design will actually have an adverse effect on your rankings.  Another point to keep in mind is that frames don’t help you in getting users to bookmark your website pages.

Keep away from putting any important stuff on Flash movies since the search engines won’t be able be to read the information unless it is in text format.   Don’t follow this advice in your website design and you are likely to have an adverse affect on your website’s search engine rankings.

Meta tags are also a very important piece of your website design that must be considered if you want to increase your search engine rankings.  The robots like Meta tags because it makes it easier to come up with rankings because it is clear what each the pages of each website are about.

Also, instead of using HTML tags in your website design, use CSS instead.   CSS is not as repetitive and makes loading much faster as well.

If you have a web based company, you must know the importance of having a mailing list.  For a large list of potential prospects in which to market your products you will need to find ways of growing that list as large as possible.  This will make marketing your company product(s) much simpler and help your sales grow exponentially.  All of this can be made possible through the use of downloads.

Having a downloadable product is one of the easiest and most effective ways of building up your targeted mailing list.  The one rule of thumb you must always follow is to make the download relevant to the information contained in your specific website.  A great example of this can be found on apple.com; through the websites free download of iTunes and Quicktime, information is provided and the website is then able to send offers out for purchases that can made on iTunes – I’d say this is a perfect way to market!

This is a feature any Toronto web design company would advise any of their clients to include in their web design.  And while you may not be able to offer a free download on the magnitude of what a company like Apple can afford to do, it doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t look for options suitable for your particular company.  Free giveaways available via download (like wallpaper or special reports) can be just as enticing.  No matter what, just make sure that a visitor to your site must provide their email address in order to receive the download, no matter how big or small.

Also, make sure that the download is strategically placed on your website.  By having a dedicated page for the download and then linking to it from every other spot on your website you will increase the odds of generating more leads.

Lastly, go the extra mile of getting the word out there that there is a download on your website.  Provide reasons to people that will make them want to log on to your website and take advantage of your website.  If you don’t do this, you may end up with a good web design which includes a quality download that no one ever hears about.

Clients are often telling us that they are interested in using website templates.  The reality is that website templates can make your life less complicated when it comes to website design, but that doesn’t mean there aren’t a few traps you should be looking to avoid.   Take a look at some common mistakes found related to the use of templates in website design.

For starters, beware of using any website template that is common or overused.  This is the easiest way for your website to have a generic look which will make it lackluster in its appeal and seem less than unique.  Any Toronto web design company would recommend that you do what you can to make your website somewhat unique so that it will stand out among websites selling similar products or services.

While it makes sense to be sure that you don’t short change yourself by using website templates that fail to separate you from the other websites out there – it is also important to stay away from doing too much customization of your website template also.  Yes, you want to be unique in your design, but keep in mind this is still a website template and it should serve the purpose of which it was intended – saving effort and time.

The flip side of this coin is that it does make sense to purchase a website template you find suitable to the tastes of your web design and then tweak it for personalization.  These changes will obviously be made according to the specific theme of your individual website.  Let’s say for example that you have found a website template that is perfect for your website about golf.  If you would rather take out the corner image of a cartoon character hitting a golf club for a photograph you have taken of yourself driving the ball, that would be up to you.  All you would need to do is make this simple replacement to add a bit of customization to your website design while still keeping the rest of the template untouched.

The bottom line is to be very selective in settling on the website template that will best work for you.  Don’t simply think about what you like, but rather consider how those who visit your site will feel about the website template and overall website design you have chosen as well.