CPUTrend

With the holiday season looming, I'm trying to make these blog posts beneficial to this time of year. Last week we had "It's a Very Nerdy Christmas!" and this week I"m bringing you tips to help you improve your website just in time for the holiday season. 

While these may be very useful for the holiday season, these tips can help any drab, out-of-date website become more sleek and efficient.

1. De-clutter - Clean up your sidebars, remove the excess tools you put on your website, commonly referred to as widgets. Unless you have a very large site with the need for it, do not have more than 1 sidebar, it distracts and clutters. De-cluttering also means trimming down your actual content. When you look at a website for the first time, you can feel overwhelmed with what is presented to you. Take what information you have, go through it, and see what is necessary for the front page. Take what isn't necessary and put it in other places other than the home page.

2. Make Buttons Bigger - With some designs it may be hard to work with this tip, but if you can pull it off, studies show that larger, more prominent, buttons have a higher conversion rate. This means that more people will click on a button that is larger, over one that is small.

3. Add Testimonials with Photos - People constantly compare themselves with others, if you can get a person to relate to a person in your testimonial, they will say to themselves "That person is like me! If they were successful with it, maybe I can be too!" This motivates the people on your site to buy a product, to feel the same satisfaction, or happiness, the person they related to felt.

4. Update - Update everything! Nobody like visiting a site that hasn't been updated in months, or sometimes even years. A static site makes it appear that you don't care about how your business is represented online, and while it not be true, people thing you then don't care about your business/products.

5. Un-boring-ify your About Page - "About" is one of the most frequently visit pages on a website. People want to know what you're really about, the motivation you have to make a good business. Make it tell a story, no entrepreneurs story is boring. We all have quirks that make us who we are, let your customer know.

6. Refresh Your Design - Look at your site...now back to mine...now back at your site...do you see the royal blue I chose? I chose it because it's easy on the eyes, modern, and bold. Pastels are out...they were out in like '98, but you get my point. Make your site look bold and modern and make sure people see you as this up to date entity.

7. Improve your Search Engine Optimization - Okay listen...This is James talking now, I'm not restating what they said at the blog source. SEO is really a big joke. You can have nice tag lines and heading ect... but the #1 way to "SEO" is writing good, relevant, and interesting posts on your site.

src:http://www.entrepreneur.com/blog/220705