The Virtual Miss Friday website states: Professional online business services. While the site looks professional — and the services probably are, too — it fails to treat visitors with respect. Three pop-ups. Three!
Common Website Mistakes That Can Kill Business
Every element on your website has the ability to build — or damage — how visitors perceive you. To gain insight on how to generate confidence, earn trust, and entice visitors to reach out and invest in your offerings, we asked website professionals:
What are common website mistakes that decrease confidence, trust and sales?
Is Poor Website Design Holding Your Business Hostage?
Online visitors form a first impression of a website quicker than the blink of an eye — literally. It typically takes humans 300 to 400 milliseconds to blink. Meanwhile, scientific research led by Dr. Gitte Lindgaard at Carleton University in Ontario reveals websites have as little as 50 milliseconds to establish a first impression — a mere 1/20th of a second. That’s it!
This is crucial information for any business because once a visitor forms an impression on a subconscious level, he or she will selectively search for information confirming that impression. People do this because we all want to prove we have good judgement. So, if our first impression of a website is negative, we have a tendency to mainly seek and see the negatives, regardless how good a business’ products and services might actually be. Alternatively, if we immediately like what we see, we’ll look for positive information to reinforce that impression.
So how do you avoid making a bad first impression on the Web? Easy. Get a good designer.
View Point: Should My Business Blog?
Adding a blog to your website is a simple and affordable way to strengthen your connection with both current and potential clients, while improving your search engine rankings. However, many business blogs quickly become neglected and abandoned, which leaves a poor impression. So we asked successful bloggers and online marketing experts:
When should a business launch a blog, and how do you create a following?
Posted on Aug 24 2010 9:04 am by Web Copywriters
| category: Business & marketing View Point | 4 Comments
| category: Business & marketing View Point | 4 Comments
Selling With Sex On the Web
Sex has been used to successfully sell products as early as 1890 when W. Duke & Sons became the leading cigarette brand by including trading cards featuring scantily clad women in their cigarette packs. Many decades of positive reinforcement later, selling with sex has become commonplace, with boundaries being pushed as far as societal morals allow. Evolutionary psychologist Geoffrey Miller even wagers that all of our consumer choices are motivated by our pursuit of primal desire, for procreation or otherwise.
How has selling with sex manifested itself on the Web? Webcopyplus recently spoke with Melody Nieves, blogger and marketing enthusiast behind www.sexidesign.com, a blog dedicated to exploring the role sex plays in marketing, for her take on sexy advertising online.
How Is Social Media Affecting Web Design?
Social media empowers consumers to be recognized by marketers as human again, their voices amplified through an expanding array of platforms in the transparent online marketplace. Businesses are learning the value of this increasing amount of unsolicited market data, as well as the power of engaging their customers in conversation. As a result, products and services are being tailored to customers more efficiently, and businesses are able to respond quicker to issues and concerns.
How are these changes affecting web design? In order to fully leverage the benefits of this new relationship between business and consumer, websites must be designed with and for the ‘social Web’, affecting aesthetics, functionality, and the development process itself.
How to Sound Smarter on the Web
Greetings, good Internet people! I’m Opticon’s sidekick, The Deleter. I specialize in exterminating spelling, punctuation and grammatical errors with a vengeance!
I wasn’t the most popular guy in school, but rest assured all those years spent studying proper language use instead of frivolous things like ‘sports’ and ‘dating’ have really paid off! Now, I’m an esteemed Internet superhero who helps well-meaning folks like you break bad language habits so you can confidently deliver your message to the masses without error or embarrassment.
Over my years of scouring the Internet for traces of technical violations I’ve noticed that some similar sounding words confuse many of you, and I’m here to get rid of this confusion once and for all.
Here’s my list of commonly confused words and their proper, and improper, uses.
Posted on Aug 2 2010 7:02 pm by Web Copywriters
| category: Opticon & The Deleter Writing for the Web | Leave a comment
| category: Opticon & The Deleter Writing for the Web | Leave a comment
Bad Copy — Your Worst Enemy
There’s a prolific villain on the loose that must be stopped. It’s a complex shape shifter and not easy to track to the untrained eye. The villain, my good people of the Internet, is bad web copy, and it’s infecting the Web, leaving traces on websites, blogs, social networks — everywhere! Your website may have already been infected, and the damage immeasurable.
Posted on Jul 27 2010 9:20 am by Web Copywriters
| category: Opticon & The Deleter Writing for the Web | 1 Comment
| category: Opticon & The Deleter Writing for the Web | 1 Comment
Why Design Needs to be Like A Quesadilla
Award-winning designer Gonzalo Alatorre, speaking at a TED conference in Mexico last month, suggested design needs to be like a quesadilla. Where was the Founder and Principal of Creative Engine, and designer of the 2010 Vancouver Winter Olympics logo going with this? We spoke to the Alatorre to uncover his motivation for making such a seemingly bizarre claim.
