Businesses offering an online storefront, know very well about the importance that this medium holds for their overall business sales. This becomes all the more true for those businesses whose only storefront is their online avatar, with no other brick and mortar presence.
It is useful to think from the perspective of the loyal customer who makes frequent trips to your online store. This person is extremely familiar with the nuances of your website, and a sudden, drastic change in its appearance will only confuse the individual with him or her having to carefully browse through and look at all your pages in order to determine where the previous links now lay.
In this context, it would be useful for you to note the sections of your website which are most commonly traversed by visitors, and make sure that the changes in these portions are really minimal. For instance, if the majority of your customers head straight to the ‘Purchase’ section of your website, make sure that the ‘Purchase’ link on the redesigned version is located at more or less the same place as earlier.
Broadly, any major change made to the design of the website should be done keeping the interest of customers in mind. If it is done only to please your creative side, or worse, to keep your web designer busy, then the whole purpose of redesigning or overhauling your website as the case may be, is not being achieved.
In this context, it would be immensely useful to inform all your customers about any major redesign initiative being undertaken on your website. To make the process hassle free and convenient for you, you could always set up a follow up autoresponder which will send out emails for the same and also follow up on them.
Essentially, the question to ask yourself constantly is “How can I make my website attractive” without destroying the familiarity that customers have with the existing design?
Most often, simple, subtle and basic changes should do the trick for you. For instance, you could change the colors of the buttons and links on your website, without changing their location. That way, your customers will continue to click where they always did, and yet find that the same experience has become a little more colorful!!
You can also consider increasing the number of pages of your website by adding additional content to it, rather than redesigning and repackaging what you already have. Additional content is what will pull more and more customers as well as the search engines towards your website.
With cheap reliable hosting commonly on offer, this should not be a problem for you at all, since increasing the overall number of pages would not push up your total web space requirement much, in light of the ample space that these hosting service providers offer.
Additional pages make particular sense for any time bound or seasonal promotional activity that you might be undertaking. These could even be designed in a novel and attractive way which will keep your creative instincts happy and at the same time, attract more and more customers.
Thus, as you can clearly see, simple changes alone can work wonders for your website. Simply make sure that you plan ahead very well, and apply sufficient doses of common sense, while going about or even considering redesigning your website.
About The Authors
Lena Morrish & Dima Nikolayenko, founders and developers of InternetBusinessBTS.com Co.
In their FREE e-mail course “7 Vital Facts You Should Know Before Starting an Internet Business” you will find a comprehensive guide on how to start your internet business, find cheap reliable hosting for your website, how to use such features like follow up autoresponder to effectively build and take care of your customer base, and much more.
