There’s nothing worse than a blinking, flashing, darkly-colored webpage covered in advertisements. Most visitors will leave rather than try to sort out the confusion.

Here are ten tips to keep your web pages clean and attractive, while at the same time garnering higher conversion rates:

1. Keep it “scan able.” In other words, have enough titles in larger print, bolding, highlighting and underlining to entice your readers in further. Most visitors will do a quick scan of the page before settling in to read or moving on. Make sure their eyes stop at places of interest.
2. Make sure your navigational links are consistent, simple and obvious so everyone can move easily from page to page. Your navigation system is not a place where you want to get fancy. Simple text links ordered vertically or horizontally work well. So do buttons and filing cabinet-like tabs.
3. Make sure the appearance matches your content, including any ads. For example, if you have an article about the symptoms to watch for when diagnosing cancer, you don’t want a lot of happy colors, blinking ads and loud music. Tone it down and keep it professional. On the other hand, if your site is about kids’ toys, a little more color and movement and silliness would be expected.
4. If this is your sales page, there should be no other advertising on it at all. Nor should you have the normal navigational links your other pages have. You want the only link away from that page to be your order link. Don’t, however, block the usefulness of the browser back button! This will only anger your visitor.
5. Use a common font, like Times New Roman or Arial. Stick to 12 point. Using a more exotic font may look great on your machine, but if your visitor doesn’t have access to that font, it will look totally different on his screen.
6. If you want to use your signature online, get a scanned-in copy to put on the website instead of using a script font. These fonts aren’t available to everyone’s web browsers.
7. Don’t let your background color or image compete or clash with your foreground. A plain white background is usually sufficient and preferable, as it’s easy on the eyes. A dark background with a contrasting colored text is very tiring to read and should always be avoided.
8. Any time you try a new design, be sure you look at it through different web browsers and screen resolutions. An online service can help you with this. Go to Browser Shots to see how your page looks through different browsers.
9. If the primary content of your page is an article or other useful information, make sure it prints well, or in some cases you may want to link to a printable version – free of ads, color and links.
10. There’s a time and place for everything. The place for large paragraphs with no white space is in the legal sections of your site – the places you hope no one reads, but you must have there by law! Long paragraphs will not grab your readers or encourage them to read more. You want to break them into shorter paragraphs being sure to keep use subtitles and white space in between.

Keep your eye on these tips during design, and look it over when you’re done with a critical eye. There are exceptions to these rules, just like every rule. But violating too many of them will surely scare away readers rather than make them click your order button.

Some people are still understandably shy of buy anything online, since identity theft has become such a huge problem.  Therefore, it’s important to ease your prospects’ minds and let them know you’re a real and honest person.  Here are some effective ways for an online entrepreneur to do that.

Don’t Be Shy – Tell Us Who You Are

Including a picture of yourself on your website shows you have nothing to hide.  Including pictures of your product gives it concreteness.  Even if your product is an eBook or software, you’ll want to find cover or box creating graphics software or hire the job out.

Provide a short audio message in your own voice.  With the picture you included in the last step, you’re now becoming a real person to your reader.  Voices convey emotion, and emotion sells.  Therefore, audio boosts conversion rates.

Put your contact information on every page.  Include your physical address and email.  A post office box is suspicious.  Including fax, landline, and mobile phone numbers also adds to your credibility.

Appearance and Content

Avoid using free email accounts and free web hosting.  They make you appear too temporary.  Remember, how you present yourself affects how people view you.  If you can’t get decent web hosting, can they trust your products are worthwhile?

Have an “About Us” page that gives a short resume of your qualifications in the topic of the website.

Always include a “Privacy Policy” page.  Internet users want to be assured you will not abuse their email addresses by selling them to other vendors.  If you collect more sensitive information, this is even more critical.  Explain to them exactly how the collected information will be used.  Explain why you track their IP address.  If their information is ever shared with a third party, describe the circumstances and how they can opt out should they choose to.

Make sure you use a secure server for all payment transactions, as well as any other sensitive information exchange.  I recently noticed someone who legitimately asked for my social security number, but did so from an unsecure website.  They would not provide another secure way to take the information, so I had to cease doing business with this company.  This could so easily have been avoided!

If your product is more complex than a short eBook, you might consider providing a user help forum for your customers.  This will give them a place to share their suggestions, air grievances and get help.  The next step up would be live support from your website.  This would have a significant positive impact if present at the buying decision point.

Testimonials and Guarantees

Use any unsolicited testimonials or positive product reviews you’ve received from your customers right on the sales page.  These often carry more weight with your prospects than your own sales copy does.  Even better is a testimonial from a known expert in your field.  Testimonials should always be tagged with the full name of the writer plus the email address or website.  The more information about the writer of the testimonial, the more believable it becomes.

Always give a 100% money-back guarantee.  This way the customer knows that if, for any reason, he isn’t satisfied with the product he buys from you, he can easily seek and obtain a refund.  Just seeing such a guarantee on your page lets him know that you believe in your product and stand by it.  Of course, it’s a legal requirement in many areas; too, so make sure you know the laws in your region.

Writing a sales letter or sales page on the web is not so different sales copy for a newspaper or magazine ad. In fact, it’s also similar to making sales in person. The same rules apply, but sometimes they just need to be addressed in a different way.

Stay Customer-Focused

When you walk into a brick-and-mortar store, the best marketers will have someone to greet you, maybe even at each department; someone who asks, “What can I help you find today?” Your website is a store. Keep that in mind as you write your copy.

You don’t want to rush up to your customer extolling the virtues and credentials of you and your company! Not that there isn’t a place for that – you may need it to build credibility and goodwill. But the first thing you want to do is direct your customer to exactly what he or she is looking for.

Emphasize Benefits, Not Features

This is one of the primary tenants of advertising, yet so many still ignore it. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes. When you first walk into the store (access the web page), you’re not looking for all the great technical specifications for that digital camera. In fact, they might not even mean much to you.

Instead you’re looking for the benefits having such a camera would give you – it’s light weight and small size so you can carry it in your pocket, the joy of viewing the pictures with colors so vivid and realistic, pictures have the same great quality indoors or out, you can view them immediately and print them yourself or have them professional printed or put to disc, etc. These are the things to emphasize in the sales letter, because they are the things that will sell most people.

Talk to One Person

Your writing style must sound like your speaking to a single person who is sitting right next to you at this very moment. Try to connect with him by recognizing his problems and offering your solutions. This is called “relationship marketing” and is quite effective. Maintaining this “conversational” tone is the key.

You’re not teaching, so don’t sound like an instruction manual. Use simple language and good grammar, but don’t let that limit you. Sometimes bending those rules will make you seem more approachable and friendly, allowing you to get your point across more quickly.

Deliver!

Deliver on your promises; keeping your web page relevant. Don’t forget how you listed your page in the search engines and in various advertising throughout the ‘net. If someone finds you based on a search for “fishing equipment,” but the first thing they see on your page is a long commentary on the latest college football game, they’ll leave before they find the fishing equipment you’re selling.

This applies to your hyperlinks within your site, too. If your link anchor says “About Us,” then the landing page can be that spot where you put all your credentials that you shouldn’t be putting on your sales page! But it should NOT be a form for him to fill out to get on your mailing list. It’s even worse if he has to press more links to actually get to the “About Us” information he was looking for in the first place!

Get Interactive

Get your customers involved in your websites. Have opinion polls. Request reactions. Take surveys. Always show the results of these activities, so users can come back and see what everyone else thought, and see their own comments reflected in those results. This makes them more likely to bookmark your site and revisit.