Like most things in life, building a great business website starts with sticking to a few simple but powerful principles. Here are the three principles we believe lead to success — and we define success as, making a visitor believe that you are the business they want to engage with and taking that critical step of purchase/contact/expression of interest.

Want to know if your web designer is doing a great job? Read the three rules below. Is he following them all?

Rule #1: Pump up the visitor’s emotional state.

Buying something is an emotional process — in fact, most decisions are made based on emotions. What is your visitor supposed to feel when they purchase your product or service? What does that product or service deliver, emotionally? Recreate that feeling through the design, copy and aesthetics of your website and your visitor won’t be able to sign up fast enough.

Rule #2: Remove all obstacles to completion of your goal (purchase, contact, etc.).

Closing the sale isn’t just about making the prospect willing to buy — you also need to remove any impediments to completing the purchase. Define your goal for the site and state it clearly on every page. Are you trying to get people to inquire about your services? Are you trying to sell them a widget and make a payment before they leave? Whatever the goal, the simpler it is for them to understand this and do it, the more likely they will. Don’t make them have to hunt to find your contact form. Give them a prompt for reaching out to you, but don’t make them structure their message too rigidly. Don’t have a multi-step purchase process: do it in one form that takes less than five minutes to fill out. Offer as many popular payment methods as you can, and once they choose one, don’t distract them with details about the others. Don’t put unnecessary obstacles in front of people: make it as simple as possible for them to complete the goal you’ve put forth.

Rule #3: Make at least one offer on every page.

Amazon makes an average of 45 offers on every page. You don’t need to have that many, because you’re probably not selling as many products as they are. But making at least one offer on every page (and preferably more) will ensure that in the moment the visitor decides they’re ready to complete your goal, they can do so. People aren’t visiting your site to play Where’s Waldo and hunt around to find your online shopping page. Make the offer NOW, make the offer ALWAYS. If they are visiting at all that means they’re interested in what you sell and if they decide they want it, the offer needs to be right there on the page that they’re viewing.

Three rules. Simple. But effective.

So… is your web designer following these rules?

Contact us to build a website that will get you bigger and better business results.