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Do: Get professional pictures taken

Instead of buying pictures from a stock photo website, invest in some professional photography for your website. This may seem like an unnecessary cost, but it will make your website seem much more welcoming and genuine. Even though visitors are not seeing or speaking to you in person, being able to get an accurate view of your business and employees will help them make a connection with your business. Not to mention having professional pictures taken means having high quality pictures that will help establish credibility with visitors.

The term user-friendly seems self-explanatory. And by the most simplistic definition, it is. When something is user-friendly, it is easily workable and accessible to others. However, there is much more to the term user-friendly than you may think. Understanding this and applying the following concepts to your website will significantly improve how easily visitors move through your website, thus increasing the amount of visitors who stay on your site, and finally increasing your conversions, giving you more of what you want out of your website.

If you could pick one thing that you want your visitors to do once they arrive on your website, what would it be? To fill out your contact form? To make a purchase from your online store? These sound good, right? Wrong. You want them to stay.

Alright, that was a bit of a trick question. But you do want your visitors to stay long enough to make that decision to fulfill the goal of your website. If your visitors come to your website, you want to grab their attention, convince them to stay, and urge them to take the next step that will result in more business for you. However, many businesses unintentionally drive their visitors away. Pretty quickly, too. You only have a few seconds to keep your visitor on your page, and there are plenty of ways to tick them off, drive them away, never to return. And worse yet, they don't just leave your website, they go to your competitors.

In today's technology driven society people like to feel in control of their internet practice.  Even just a few seconds delay in load time can create an unpleasant user experience.  The slower a site is the less people feel in control and the less time a user is likely to spend there.  Imagine the impact a faster site has on your operating costs.

Here are three easy steps to getting your business’s website to the top of Google in one week or less:

The average conversion rate for a website is around 3%. This doesn’t have to be your story. Many websites convert at 10 percent and higher. What
are they doing right that you’re missing?

“How’s my site doing?” 

This is a question I hear a lot. Let me answer your question with a question…or six. The effectiveness of your website shouldn’t be answered in one sentence. There is a whole lot of factors that go into dissecting the power of your business on the internet, and all of them should be considered when answering the question above.  

The problem is most people don’t know where to start. The purpose of this list is to give you a better idea of how well your website is performing on the internet, and to allow you to see the full potential of your business on the web. So go through and answer each of these questions, use the resources provided to guide you, and find out once and for all “how your site’s doing.”

In the near future, the amount of mobile phones with internet access (a.k.a. smart phones), will outnumber the amount of people living in the US. This gives businesses a whole new outlet for selling their products. Make sure your business is ready for the flow of customers who will be visiting your website through their phones with these three steps:

With the number of different devices used everyday, having a mobile site is crucial for many businesses to be able to compete effectively. In todays’ society, it is not safe to assume that a website will be viewed on a desktop computer, especially considering the number of different devices people use everyday, from their smartphone, netbooks and ipads or even a web-enabled TV. People expect to be able to navigate your site on their phone as easily as they would on a desktop, and if your companys’ website does not look good on the device of their choice, the probability that the user will move on to another site is high.

If I’m not selling my product online I don’t need a website.
Reality Check: Websites can do so much more than just sell products. Informing, brand building, interacting, promoting, and communicating are just some of the things a website can provide for your visitors. Even if you can’t sell your product online, websites allow for you to generate leads through contact forms and other methods.