What Customers Look For In A Website

If you are doing business online, consider your website as your main product and your readers, your customers. You can’t always think that people really spend their time and money on your website so it’s essential that you make a periodic audit to figure out if your customers have really meet their needs and not just reach out to them through social media and blogging.
People are diverse but when it comes to the internet, we all look for a few things in selecting who to follow, trust, and patronize. The following is a list of seven essential things that every web site should have.

Ease of use
Your website should not be confusing or hard to navigate. Web customers typically look for simple things: your products, information about you, your blog, your contact page. These should always be prominent and easy to find, as should any other information or links you want people to follow. The font should be easy to read and the links should be keyword-rich and easy to spot.

Clarity of content
Your content, including the call-to-action, should be easy to understand. This applies to every single page of your website. If your readers can’t understand you, they will leave.

Credibility
First, your website should definitely have a dedicated contact page with a contact form, e-mail address (avoid free email addresses like @gmail or @yahoo) and a physical location and phone number. Credibility also includes not only on-page content like testimonials and comments, but also third-party validation in the form of Twitter followers, Facebook fans and awards or certifications. The quicker readers are able to discover that you are a thriving business vouched for by other people, the sooner they can make the decision to trust you.

Uniqueness
This applies to your site design, to your product and to your content. If your site doesn’t look interesting, people are not gonna waste their time looking on it. If you’re like every other business in the market, why should your readers listen to you?

Participation / Ability to give feedback
If your customers can’t reach you easily, they’ll give up. If they contact you but don’t receive a speedy respond, they’ll leave and either forget you or damage your credibility. So provide an easy way for customers to interact with you and give them as many options as you canhandle: phone number, social media, contact form, and blogging are some of the most popular ones. People will likely trust and be loyal to you if they see that you are open and are always available.

Personalization
Remember that every single person you interact with or sell to is unique and has his or her own expectations from your product and services. No one likes to be referred to as “Dear Customer” in an e-mail, and everyone likes offers and products about subjects that are of special interest to them! So get to know your customers, store the individual information they share with you and use it to build personal and lasting relationships.

Security
Readers and customers want to be sure that any and all personal information provided to you will stay confidential and not be sold to third parties or misused. If you are selling products, this means SSL security. If you are asking for e-mail addresses for a marketing list, this means respecting your readers’ privacy. If you are connecting with people on social media, this means discretion on your part about any and all personal interactions.

Does your web site pass the test?

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The Benefits of Choosing The Right Fonts and Page Size for Web

Font type and size. What boring elements, but what important ingredients in any written communication. We often don't notice font, even when we can't read it: it's almost completely transparent.Writing for the web however forces us to use a completely different set of rules, and those rules created for hard copy writing don't really apply any more. For example, when writing for print you should really use a Times-like font when writing, because the slight serifs (the small marks at the end of each leg of a letter) allow the reader to quickly separate and identify the letters more quickly than any other letter. This is part of the meta-information of a document: it facilitates meaning without meaning something itself.

However, the rule is different for the web. Researchers have found that sans-serif fonts, specifically Verdana or Helvetica, work the best. People can more easily read on the screen when using these fonts. Thus, when setting font type, these are perhaps the best used.Actually many specify "verdana, sans-serif;" just to be safe. In such a case if verdana is not available, the available sans-serif will be displayed. This might be a trend, after all web design is design after all, but research has demonstrated that sans-serifs seem to enhance understanding when reading online information.Maybe it has something to do with how we read online. We scan for information, when we find that information we concentrate on it, and then move on. We tend to skip to topics sentences throughout a page. Thus, perhaps words in san-serifs stand out more. And because we aren't reading an immense amount of text, we don't need the same strategies we use when reading hard copy documents (with which we typically read much more than we do online anyway).With regards to font size: larger is not better! Large fonts make for awkward reading, and it is difficult to use the space effectively to find the information we're looking for when the words are too big. A font size of what would be equivalent to 11 pt typically are the best. Sans-serif fonts tend to be larger, so scaling it back down from what we would normally use on hard copy (12 pt) is needed anyway.

You can use bigger font sizes, of course, for headings and titles, but try to limit the amount of larger font sizes used: it actually detracts from understanding and it's hard to see the entire screen easily when the font size of any element is large.Using colors with text is tricky. Web designers used to erroneously think that bright colors would attract people to read something. They also felt that some type of rainbow effect was useful or would be catchy somehow. It was actually more kitsch than catch.The rules of contrast apply especially to screen. Light background and dark font need to be used to effectively communicate. Because we scan screens for information, you need to use effective contrast to highlight information. We will quickly miss important information that blends in with the background.The size of the page, and the amount of text on it are also extremely crucial to aiding people in their task of finding and understanding information. As we graze over a web page, we are scanning back and forth for specific pieces of information. Thus, long paragraphs tend to hamper our attempts. The more information we put in a paragraph, and the longer it is, the more people have to scan.

This will cause a couple of things to happen. People will either get frustrated and leave, or they will not find the information they need because it's buried under a layer of text they don't need. Thus breaking up the paragraphs into smaller, more manageable chunks of information--usually by subtopic--is necessary to help people find information.Many experts recommend what's called the upside-down pyramid approach to organizing information. Unlike hard copy writing strategies, where we introduce a topic and gradually get to the point, we want to quickly give the important information at first and then fill in the details. Readers will first read the important info, perhaps the first or topic sentence of a paragraph, and then determine what they want to read next.Also, the length of a page can be a detriment to design. Long, scrolling pages are harder to navigate as well, according to many studies. Users would rather skip to the next page, just like when reading a book, than scroll through a bunch of information they don't need. We don't use things like papyrus scrolls anymore, after all, so it's hard for users to adjust to finding information in that manner.To enhance the amount of information the user gets, we need to also try to constrain the viewing information as well as the amount of information we are giving. Thus, the viewing size in which the primary information is given should be reduced. This makes the reading task more familiar to users because, again, it's more like reading hard copy, which is how we were originally taught to read: small pages with small bits of information. We weren't originally trained on the landscaped rectangles we use to view web pages on, thus it just doesn't seem natural.Writing for the web isn't hard, it just takes a different set of considerations than writing for print.

More About Faith Monkey Located in Denver, CO Faith Monkey is a leading solutoin provider of SEO, web marketing and hosting services. To Learn more about Faith Monkey, visit our website at http://www.faithmonkey.com/