User Experience for Websites Part 2
Excellent video is at the center of the best websites, the ones that are pleasing to visit and effective at converting visitors into customers. But the first concern is having a great website. Even if you have fantastic video marketing campaigns, if your potential customers can't quickly understand what you do or how you can help them, your efforts to market to them may’ve been fruitless from the start. There are, however, some key tips you can keep in mind when designing your website that can help you clearly communicate your mission—showing visitors the value you bring.
We’ve teamed with user experience designer Gustavo Hernando to make 3 videos to teach you some of those critical, yet simple tips that can make your website’s user experience wonderful, including what to show online, how you should describe your business, and how to help give customers what they need.
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Hi, I’m Gustavo Hernando and I help small businesses have more effective websites.
Today we’ll go over how you should describe your business, so as to give visitors reasons to trust you. We’ll start by focusing on the About page and using Talking Head Studio as an example again.
You can mention how long you've been in business, years of experience, your company size and a few short facts about your company’s history. You’ll see here that Talking Head Studio mentions that they have over 10 years of experience.
They help visitors verify they're a real business with photos of their studio. If you do business over the web, photos of workplace or your product is good enough. Instead of Stock Photography, hire a professional photographer for a day.
It will surely pay off in terms of increased authenticity, and thus increased visitor trust. Include testimonials from people praising your company or products and services. According to the firm Gartner, a customers are 2.5 times more likely to do business with you when you reference a satisfied customer. Here are some I have on my website.
Let’s look at another website I designed for a client.
This is the About page of National Asset Protection Agency. You want to provide a photo and brief description of each of the key people in your business. Seeing smiling faces will add to the tone of your site and will really help build trust.
Also, listing your affiliations is something you can add, if applicable, to demonstrate your credibility.
Showing that you're a member of trade or industry groups help prove that you have a particular level of competence.
If they're comparing two sites, they will choose the one with more credible information because it made them feel more confident during their decision process.
Because what you do is usually more complex than people expect, helping your potential customers understand it better will make it more likely for them to call you.
Unlike talking about what you sell, you want something to show what you know.
That might take the form of how-to articles or the more common approach of a free pdf or report that they can download.
The goal is to make people want to learn more.
For instance, if you're a web designer, you can educate people what to do to make their websites more effective.
Sound familiar? :)
If you're a video production company, you can talk about if video quality is important for YouTube.
This type of content is useful because most people would rather bring in an expert once they see all that is involved.
One more way to share your knowledge with your customers is by having a blog. You want to be consistent though so that it does not look stale and reduce your visitors trust in you.
I’ve got one more video and in the third video I’m gonna show you how to help people quickly find what they need.