Web Design & SEO For Small Businesses

Getting a better conversion from your website is very important. Why? Because your conversion rate is measured by the number potential visitors who are going to buy your products or services. Many website owners focus solely on to bring a lot of visitors to the site but they hardly focus on making that visitors to buyers. This problem can be solved by making some simple changes to their existing site or layout which will have a huge impact on overall conversion rate of the website.

Below is 10 techniques to improve your sites conversion with minimal expense.

1. Make it easy for Users – Make it easy for the user to use the site. It sounds pretty simple but there several elements in the design which make the visitors difficult to use the website, like for example, accessibility of your website, browser compatibility and finally the usability of the site. A potential visitors always look for more information about the products and services before they make a purchasing decision. Things like these can reduce the chance reduced sales from your website.

2. Value your Users Time – Time is important for everyone. If you website have too many complicated questions and hard to find things what the visitors is looking for is making the visitor to waste their time. This means scaring your visitors away. Some of the common mistake are asking too much information which is not required, having several steps to take action, important information are not able to find it easily etc.

3. Be honest to the user – Most people are very cautious about online transactions and giving out information online. So you need to keep them honest to increase your conversion for example having physical address, a valid phone number and some online trust certificates will increase the credibility of your website in the eyes of the user and increase your conversion rate.

4. Have a clear Return Policy/Privacy Policy – As I said above online customers always need to trust you so make clear everything in your return policy if you are having a e-commerce kind of site or privacy policy if you are collecting a lead. Online visitors don’t like their personal information being distributed to others. Also make these link to these pages easily accessible for example on a product page you can find return policy easily it can increase conversion as well as on the contact us form if you have privacy policy prominently placed can increase the conversion rate.

5. Multiple ways to reach you – All online visitors are not alike they are different in their approach as well as the online behavior is different too. They user different ways to reach you or find information on your website. Some online buyers like to talk before they buy other prefer email communication etc. So user multiple ways like live chat, phone number in all pages, contact us page easily accessible, forums if they want to discuss about your products and a blog as well to community with the user. Offering multiple ways to communicate increase your conversion rate.

6. User Reviews – This technique applies to ecommerce sites if users can provide honest opinion about your products through user review it will help the new users to read these opinions and make a decision. As testimonials increase your credibility users review will increase the chances of increasing your conversion rate. Provide a place for users to give their feedback about your products.

7. Discount Codes and Coupons – Discount coupons are not a new concept, shopper offline has always been enthusiastic about discount coupons because it helps them to have a substantial saving on their budget. Recently online discount coupons and promo codes has gain rapid importance. Today most of the ecommerce sites uses promo codes to increase their sales. Also there are several places online where you can promote your online discount codes. If you use Google local listing they also allow you have promo code for your business. These extra steps with online discount codes can increase your conversion as well.

8. Pricing Strategy – Again this is more relevant to ecommerce related sites because most of the online buyers are not aware of their shipping and handing cost until they reach the check out stage. If you could offer shipping calculators or a page specifically for shipping with all the cost details the customers would have a clear idea how much it is going to cost them before they buy. A good pricing strategy will always increase the conversion rate of your ecommerce site.

9. Tracking with Analytics – Imagine a football team coach, coaching a team without keeping a track of which strategies worked and didn’t work to beat the competition. This is the same with if you didn’t use a web analytic tool to track the activities on a website. Several website owners loose many opportunities to increase leads and sales because they fail to track and have a strategy to increase their ROI. In addition tracking the site through analytics will also tell why they are buy and why they are not. Web Analytics are also the key to reducing shopping cart abandonment rate. Use web analytics to measure the drop off in the sales funnel or buying process.

10. Website Testing – Not all websites are perfect it takes time and effort to make a website work. Now a days there are tools to test your website to find which one works and which didn’t work. Using tools like Google website optimizer you can test each every page of your website and see which layout or changes in design element got your the maximum sales. You can test anything on a website using these tools and see which one work better for you and increase your ROI.

There is no better way to increase your conversion of your website than doing nothing. Start right now, the more you experiment with your website the more you will learn and more opportunity to improve the conversion of your website. Testing these techniques on your website and constantly tracking them will see improvement and increase in your ROI.

Which conversion techniques worked for your websites? Please feel free to leave that in the comments.

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Validation in Website designing provides guidelines for the web designers to prepare well structure and browser friendly website. Website validation ensure that the websites comply with web standards. A validated web page defines which version of html or XHTML is used to code the website.
It is necessary for browsers to process the document correctly. Here are valuable Firefox adds on for web page validation.

1.  HTML Validator – Validates HTML documents using the CSE HTML Validator engine for Windows. This addson require CSE HTML Validator for Windows. It is very simple to use and efficient in its performance. This is a great tool for web developers and web admins who want to go an extra mile. An excellent add-on!

2. W3C RSS Validator -
Validates a page using the W3C RSS Validator. Once you open the RSS feed into the browser window, you can right click on the page or goto the Tools menu and validate the RSS feed. The results will open in a new tab.

3. W3C CSS Validator – Validates a page using the W3C CSS Validator. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the CSS of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab. Will only work on pages that have a CSS file associated. For example it will work with http://www.w3.org/ as the URL has a CSS file.

4. W3C Page Validator – Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service. Adds an option to the right-click context menu and to the Tools menu to allow for easy validation of the current page. Opens the results in a new tab. This is a simple extension that will work only for online pages.

5. W3C XML Validator – This is a very simple extension that validates W3C XML schema documents.

6. W3C Offline Page validator – Validates the source of a HTML/XHTML page via the W3C Markup Validation Service using the direct-input form. Validates a page using the W3C Markup Validation Service, even if the page is not public.

7. Validaty – One Click Validator. Provides you a button to validate a page using a validator like…

8. Total Validator – Perform multiple validations and take screen shots in one go. This 5-in-1 validator works with external, internal, or local web pages using the Total Validator service or local copy of the desktop tool…

So that’s my list of 8 extensions for web page validation which will make your validation experience better. Some of them are very useful and essentical for every web designers. What Firefox Validation addons is your favorite please leave your comments.

Firefox has been one of the fastest and most user friendly browser for anyone. I can’t think working without it. Firefox extensions help web analyst to test, report and analysis the web data easily. I’ve used Firefox for close to four years now and I’ve found a number of extremely useful third party plug-ins and extensions to simplify manipulation, analysis and graphing of data. analysis analytic, reporting

Here is the list of 10 top user web analytic Firefox extensions.

1. Web Analytics Solution Profiler/Debugger (WASP)

Provides detailed information about the data being collected trough Query String and Cookies by web analytics solutions. Covers 125 tools, including Google Analytics, Omniture SiteCatalyst, Coremetrics, WebTrends, ad networks and several others.

2.Data Analytics Firefox Addson

DataAnalytics is a Firefox extension that enables importation, manipulation, analysis and graphing of data. Often websites lock their information in static tables.

3. TrackMe Analytics on user habits.

TrackMe delivers Personal Analytics on user habits and can provide teachers with a tool to use in assessment which can encourage learners to engage in inquiry in a domain, whilst documenting and developing their habits.

4.Greasemonkey

Grease monkey allows you to customize the way a webpage displays using small bits of JavaScript. Here’s a list of scripts which’ll help web analysts, before that make sure u have latest version of grease monkey addons.

5. Checks to see if Google Analytics is installed on any given page

This extension checks the current page you are on to see if Google Analytics is installed. It’ll automatically detect and report back to your browsers status bar.

6. Counterpixel – Display the counting/measurement pixel of a website.

The tool tries to find counting/measurement pixel of tracking software from different services and companies.

7. Fire Analytics – allows you to view Google Analytics reports in Firefox.

Open Tools > Fire Analytics menu, specify your email & password on Preferences tab (alternatively you can just log into your account using browser), choose Report type and click “Show report” button.

8. Better Google Analytics – Enhances Google Analytics with a compilation of user scripts.

9. Ghostery – Firefox Plugin

Ghostery lets you see the invisible web on every page on the web. Invisible web objects include web bugs that track your behavior as well as analytic trackers used by the sites you visit to understand their own audience.

10. Alexa Sparky

Sparky is a free Firefox browser plugin built by Alexa, that accompanies you as you surf, providing useful information about the sites you visit without interrupting your Web browsing.

These firefox extensions saves us a lot of time for to analysis our web traffic efficiently. If We have missed out or if anyone have any thoughts about these web analytic firefox plugin please feel free to add a comment. Also in future this list would be expanded as and when new addson are added.