A poorly designed website can cost you money. It doesn’t matter how great your product is, because no one will stay around long enough to read about it, if your website looks unprofessional. Going online with your business can be extremely lucrative. There are millions of individuals out there looking to make purchases, however, there are just as many businesses waiting to sell to them. You must make sure that your website makes individuals want to buy from you instead of from your competitors.

Web savvy and inexperienced online buyers want to spend their money with companies that have a professional image. An unprofessional or ugly website gives the impression that your company is not trustworthy, and has an inferior product. Now, neither of these things may be true and you may get a few people to purchase from you in spite of the appearance of your website, but many more will not. You will likely be missing out on a good deal of revenue.

A good website will be attractive, well designed, provide good information and possess some type of call to action. It will compel individuals to do something. In most businesses’ cases, it will to make a purchase or join some type of list so that they can build a marketing base for the future.

Your website should also be “sticky.” This simply means that people should want to spend time there. A website that has good information, great colors, pictures and videos encourage people to spend more time at the site. The longer that they are at the website, the likelihood increases that they will make a purchase. A good website designer will understand this and incorporate these features into your site.

When developing your website, be sure to place much of the important information at the top of the website or above the fold. You won’t want to force your visitors to have to scroll down to the bottom of the page. They may never make it that far, which means you miss out on a chance to make a sale. Also, be sure that your visitors understand the purpose of your site. Do you want them to gather information, buy something or join your list? Make sure that this obvious and communicated early on, preferably above the fold.

Take a good, close look at your website and try to determine if its’ design turning off visitors. If you don’t trust your judgment have a friend, or someone with the proper knowledge to critique it for you.

A website that is clean, informative, attractively designed, purposeful and provides some type of call to action will increase the likelihood that a visitor will stop and spend time at your site. If you can get them to do that, you increase the chances that they will do the thing that you want them to do the most, pull out their wallets and spend some money!