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February 17, 2007
In some of my posts on web site design, and in my Introduction to Web Site Design Course www.WebSiteTrainingOnline.com, I emphasize keeping web pages clean and simple. Not everyone is tech savvy, and not everyone thinks like you do, or thinks like you were thinking when you designed your web site. You need to make it easy for anyone to follow your layout and your navigation. Your objective when creating a web page for your Internet business should be to improve sales. If your objective is not sales but something else like list building or even getting the visitor to pick up the phone and call for more information, the objective should be improving that desired action. Everything about your web site should be optimized toward having as many visitors take that desired action, placing an order, or adding their contact information to your list. The measure of how many visitors actually order or take the desired actions is called conversion ratio. The higher the conversion ratio, the more profitable your Internet business will be.
One thing that affects conversion ratio is the design of the links on your page. Eric Graham just posted the results of a split test that he performed that shows blue underlined links perform almost 10% better than non-blue, non-underlined links. You can read his whole report here: www.ConversionDoctor.com/conversion-blog/2007/usability-split-test-results-link-appearance-matters-more-than-you-think. Why is this true? Because the default link display behavior of web browsers has historically been blue and underlined. So people get used to it. And like a herd of cattle they follow. You can dress up links and use CSS or slices of images to make your links prettier or fancy, but guess what - it will cost you in lost sales.
I had configured this blog to have blue links, but only the links inside the actual posts were underlined. The post title links were not underlined, nor were the links in the left and right columns. After reading Eric's post I quickly edited my CSS file to make all links underlined as well. By the way, that's the nice thing about CSS, I didn't have to edit my web pages, or edit each of my blog templates, just a quick search and replace, save the CSS file and upload it to the web site and it's changed. Learn more about CSS with my Introduction to Web Site Design Course at www.WebSiteTrainingOnline.com,
The purpose of an Internet business, or any business for that matter, is to make money. I'd rather have an ugly web site that paid the bills vs. a pretty web site that does not. So even if you don't like underlined, blue links, if you want higher conversion ratios and a more successful Internet business stick to blue, underlined text links.
Take care,
Fred
About the Author
Fred Black is an experienced online business operator, programmer, web site developer, father, husband, musician, and songwriter. Visit his Internet Business Blog at: http://www.pqInternet.com.
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Posted by Fred on February 17, 2007 | Printer-Friendly
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Assigned Categories:
Copywriting
| Internet Business
| Internet Marketing
| Web Site Design, HTML, CSS
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