Don’t scare away potential customers because they don’t trust you. An SSL certificate says: “We’re legit.” “We value your privacy.” “Your online transaction is safe and secure.” When customers see that little golden padlock in their browser, they know they are protected.

What is an SSL Certificate?

It’s a certificate that verifies your online identity and encrypts sensitive information that is sent through your website. It should contain information like: your domain name, certificate holder’s name, issue date, issuer name, and possibly details about your business like organization name and location.

Check out this video for an explanation:

Why would you need an SSL Certificate?

You have an online store
Your website has a login to a confidential area
You need to transmit sensitive customer/business information
You need to ensure privacy
You want to gain trust

There are countless companies offering SSL certificates. Verisign claims up to an 87% increase in transactions when businesses use Verisign Extended Validation SSL. GoDaddy is another option. Shop around and see what is best for your small business needs and budget.

First of all, why is this so important? What’s so wrong with click here and see more?

Effective website links draw the eye and spark interest. They encourage clicking because people want more. Click here is an oft overused link term which is nondescript and uninteresting. No one will click anywhere without a good reason. Get a $10 discount for commenting on this blog would entice more clicking ; )  If you want a “sticky” website that offers findable information, you need to write effective links.

Jakob Nielsen recently conducted a study (First 2 Words: A Signal for the Scanning Eye) based on their findings that web users typically scan a web page in an F-pattern. They tested 80 users understandings of the first 11 characters of 20 different website links. The most effective links followed these guidelines (excerpt):

• Use plain language
• Use specific terminology
• Follow conventions for naming common features
• Front-load user- and action-oriented terms

(Read the study summary here. You can also learn more by signing up for their Writing for the Web course at the Web Usability Conference. If you do any writing for the web for your small business, this is a must-do.)

Notice the F-pattern? People generally read the first few lines in a list and read less as they go down.

I did a quick little test on my own website. Here’s a truncated list of a few of my links:

• Learn more
• See example
• View Resume
• Contact Min
• contact us
• Web Design
• Web Design
• SEO/SEM & I
• Dynamic, In
• Web Analyti
• E-mail Mark

Not  too bad. Areas to work on: (1) Learn More and See Example are too generic. (2) And the two links starting with Web Design are two different links, but you can’t tell because they’re truncated. Other than that most links use plain language, are specific, or use action words at the beginning. So I’ll go back a tweak a few of my links.

HOMEWORK: Scan your website’s links (especially ones that are in list format). Without reading the context, can you predict where they’ll take you? Let me know how you make out!

Do you have a logo for your small business? Great! Have you crafted a logo style guide? Sometimes people outside your company need to use your logo. And a style guide is a brief document that will help to protect the use of your logo. After you’ve paid all that money for a well-designed logo, you don’t want somebody changing up the colors, stretching it, or putting their own initials on it!

I’ve listed some important elements that should be included in your logo style guide below. If you think of others, please share them with our community!

• Size: such as smallest size it can be printed at
• Surrounding white space: least amount of white space around the logo — usually determined in proportion to your logo
• Colors: for example, specific Pantone colors you use
• Background: provide examples of the logo on permitted background colors, or specify what is allowed
• Fonts: permitted fonts that can be used in conjunction with logo
• Options: give optional logos for people to choose from

So you’ve spent lots of time and money designing your small business website, and you’ve just launched it for the public to see. But wait! Do you know you could be ignoring a large percentage of the population and thus reducing the market audience you are targeting?

You might take for granted that some users cannot use a mouse.

When designing your website, you should design web content in an accessible format (not as an afterthought), keeping in mind people who have:

• Visual impairments (Blind, Color blind, Senior citizens)
• Hearing impairments
• Physically disabilities
• Learning disabilities
• English as a second language
• Slower internet connections
• Access to Internet content on multiple platforms (mobile phones, etc)

You will reap several business benefits by following web site accessibility standards:

• Improve the searchability of your website.
• Increase usability and help to improve web conversions.
• Increase information access to more people using assistive technologies and adaptive technologies.
• Accessibile web design is required by law in some places, so your business brand will benefit by complying with accessibility standards.

9 Accessibility Mistakes to Avoid When Designing a Website:

1. All your links read: “Click Here.” This could be confusing to visitors using screen readers and other assistive technologies. Instead, use a descriptive link that gives useful clues about where you’ll take them once they click.
2. You use tables to layout your web pages. Instead, use tables for organizing ‘tabular data’ (for charts and such) to eliminate confusing and repetitive table tags. Opt for CSS to layout and style your web content.
3. Your pages use extremely small type (because “it looks cool”) that can’t be resized in the browser. People with sight disabilities may need larger text in their browser. If your design breaks or doesn’t allow that, they will have to leave your website.
4. Color is used as an integral design or navigation element. That would confuse those who are color blind (take the color blind test). And remember some monitors don’t display colors accurately.
5. You’ve got light grey text on a white background or dark grey type on a black background (because it’s “so Web 2.0″). This makes reading a difficult and painstaking process. You need to use a bit more contrast for users with challenged vision. You don’t have to completely sacrifice design for functionality, but do keep this in mind. And do allow users to make their own decisions about how they browse your page.
6. All description, title and alt tags have been left blank so people must guess what your page and images are all about. Make sure your web designer goes that extra step, labeling and describing the contents of your page. This may mean that you, the business owner, must provide content for the designer to input.
7. There are no captions on any video or audio recordings, and no transcripts are provided for the deaf. Physically challenged users might miss out on this quality web content. So don’t leave anyone out, and make sure to offer alternative versions of your audio/visual content.
8. There are no descriptive tags in web forms explaining how to fill them out. Close your eyes and imagine filling out an online form. Where do you start, what should you type, in what format? To ensure that you recieve high quality form submissions (or recieve submissions at all), try including descriptive form tags. You web designer should also insert any instructions (like “enter year with four digits: 2010″) before the form fields, not after.
9. You used an online validator, but didn’t do any web content accessibility testing on actual users with disabilities. An online validator is a good place to start. But it is not a good substitute for a person. Testing your page on a group of people who have disabilities will give you most invaluable feedback about your site.

Recommended Reading:

• Website Accessibility Under Title II of the ADA
• Understanding Disabilities When Designing a Website
• Beyond ALT Text: Making the Web Easy to Use for Users With Disabilities: 75 Best Practices for Design of Websites and Intranets, Based on Usability Studies with People Who Use Assistive Technology
• Web Usability Accessibility and Usability Resources

Resources:

• Web Site Accessibility Tools, Checklist & Guidelines
• Test URL in Online Checker
• List of Screen Readers

If you’ve ever taken a long road trip, you’ve noticed that highway signs remain consistent across the country. Signs are the same color choices, typically the same typeface, same large readable text, with similar abbreviations. This helps you as a driver to quickly recognize and assimilate where you are and make split second decisions on where you are going.

Consistent navigation helps guide your visitors, avoiding frustration and abandonment.

As people use the internet, they are “travelling” at lightning speed, scanning images and information very
quickly. So your website must have clear and consistent navigation in order to facilitate seamless web experiences.

Experts on web usability say that a good, consistent navigation system should answer these three questions:

1. Where am I?
2. Where have I been?
3. Where can I go?

Just as highway signs let you know: (1) you are on Route 95, (2) you are passing Philadelphia, and (3) you are headed South and can go to Delaware or Baltimore, web navigation gives you visual cues to keep you informed, guided, and not lost. Quickly. Go to another country, and a road trip should not seem all that foreign to you. Similarly, jumping from website to website, you should know what page you’re on, in what section, and what other sections you can navigate to from any page to get to your destination.

Links should stand out and be consistent and legible. Your web designer should use server side includes to form navigation so that it’s consistent on every page. That also makes it easy to make site-wide changes in minutes.  And make sure your navigation is readable and searchable by search engines.

Is this scenario familiar? It’s the bottom of the sixth, and bases are loaded. But once again the team just can’t seem to get any runs. The crowd lets out a collective sigh. Tracking your web analytics software can be just as disappointing. Your SEO, link building, and Pay Per Click Advertising efforts have increased the number of visits to your site. But these visitors are disappearing like sand in a sieve.

Experienced designers know they should be focusing on web site conversions — not just counting the visits, but making the visits count. We will discuss just three of the many ways you can improve your web site conversions and increase the success of your site.

First of all, your web site should have definite objectives. There are informational sites, e-commerce sites, blogs, etc. Your goals should be specific and quantifiable, for instance: to receive e-mails, online inquiries, phone calls, etc. Meeting your objectives means the you have attracted your ideal web site visitor and they have answered your call to action, completing the sale or becoming a lead. How do we do that?

1. Offer clear, consistent navigation.

Your navigation should be descriptive, and lead people to where they think they should end up. This is about THEM, not you. Web visitors scan a page very quickly looking for keywords they’ve thought up in their own brains. So your menu items should include words and phrases your visitors would be expecting, not cute, kitschy titles or what you want to force feed them. Then each click of the mouse needs to take people from a more general to a more specific place — getting them closer to their objective. If someone isn’t finding what they are searching for, they will become bored or frustrated and give up. And you’ve lost a web conversion.

2. Focus on benefits & problem solving.

I can’t stress the importance of this enough. Web copy is just as important as the content of any marketing piece. Your web content must focus on the visitor’s needs, interests, problems. Talk about specific ways in which your business will meet these needs and solve these problems. Now, you’ve got a listening ear, and now you’re on your way to getting a web conversion. Writing on the web must take into account many factors such as audience, purpose, search engines, etc. So small business owners need to spend time, effort and money on quality web copy. And please spell check!!!

3. Tell people what to do.

This is where your call to actions comes in. Think back to your site objectives. Each page should have clear directions about where visitors should go. And it’s gotta be big and bold and extremely clear to web site visitors. Do some informal web site testing: ask a couple of friends or colleagues to sit down and use your site. Look for signs of confusion or hesitation, and frantic clicking of the browser’s Back Button. These are all signs that you may need to call-out your call to action.

These were just three of the dozens of ways you can improve web site conversions. Contact an experienced web designer or a usability expert to increase your web conversions. And start turning those hits to home-runs.

If your website conversions are low, have you carefully planned out the forms on your website? You could be experiencing web form abandonment. I will discuss just three common places where Just-In-Time web design is needed in your website forms.

What is Just-In-Time design? Take for example the envelope I opened yesterday. I opened this piece of mail to pay a bill. And right where I stuck my thumb in to rip it open, it read “Wouldn’t it be nice to open less mail?” My eyebrows went up, and I almost said “Yes!” out loud. That was the only statement that grabbed my attention on the entire mail item (including the Amount Due). The key was: Timing and Placement. Let’s apply this design principle to your online forms.

But first, please take about 15 minutes going through the main contact forms or e-commerce forms on your company’s website. Have you ever done this? I am surprised by how many business owners have never sat down and gone through the basic steps taken by their website users every day.

Make a note of pieces of information that are just perfect, helpful, missing, out of place, or not useful. Go back a page and then forward a page in your browser. Is the information still there? Do you need to input it all over again? Type in the wrong information or skip a required field. Click “Submit.” What happens? Are you frustrated yet? So are your website visitors. And frustrated customers will quickly abandon your site and surf elsewhere.

Using Just-In-Time Website Design for Effective Online Forms:

1. Handling Form Errors. Many forms on the web are extremely long with many required fields and special formatting requested. When these demands are not met, users get errors and become frustrated.

• If a field is required, let the user know at that point in the form, on the same line as the form field (not at the beginning or the end of the form).
• Don’t use color coding or asterisks. Who has time to read the fine print to figure it all out? It’s better to permit the user to enter less information (only what is actually necessary to process their request) and to allow for spaces, no spaces, and parentheses in account and phone numbers. But if that’s not possible, tell the person right where it’s relevant. For example: Enter your social security number (Ex: 123-45-6789).
• Ask your web designer to do dynamic error checking. That way, if the person makes a simple error, the user will be alerted to their mistake immediately at the appropriate location in the form before they go through the trouble of submitting it.

2. Offer your privacy policy when they need it. Do you read privacy policies for pleasure? No. It’s usually when you need to establish trust and figure out what on earth a company wants your home phone number and middle name for. When you ask a person for any personal information, you need to prominently link to your privacy policy right there. Let the user know up front that you won’t be selling their email address or sending them spam. Even if no one reads it, the link lets them know you care about their privacy and helps ease their mind during the form submission process.

3. Offer registration after you get users’ information. You’ve visited a beautiful website, found an amazing product, and want to quickly buy it before you have to run off to an appointment. Time is tight, and BAM! You are asked to register. You may not plan on revisiting this site, so you don’t actually want to register. This is another place where the Just-in-Time design principle comes into play.

• When a person wants to purchase a product, they should be able to enter their payment information and make the purchase quickly. After that is finished, then ask if they would like to register on your website. At that point, you already have their information, and it can automatically be applied to their registration.
• This is a much simpler, more natural and polite way to solicit registered users and your customers will appreciate you for it. They may even come back to visit your website.

These were just 3 common places where your online forms can be improved. There are dozens of places where this principle could be applied in online forms in order to improve the user experience and to drive sales.

Jamila Vaughan of Mindspring Design is a web & graphic design consultant for small businesses making your brand work for you. Contact Mindspring Design today at info@mindspringdesign.com for a consultation or analysis of your website.

As a small business owner, you are an expert in your field. You have passion, knowledge, and valuable talents to share. But how do you keep potential customers from skimming past your well-thought-out advertising, or how do you compel a past client to come and try out a fabulous, new offering?

There’s a plethora of advice on sales & marketing strategies for business owners, but I will discuss five simple ways you can visually improve your marketing materials. Educate yourself before a graphic designer proposes a new flyer. And take ho-hum, snooze-inducing brochures and posters from “Zzzzzz” to “Wow!”

1.    Choose your weapon.

First, you must choose the medium that best fits your audience. What will attract the most attention and remain in their memories? Does your industry regularly print hundreds of tri-fold brochures for customers? Print them at an irregular size with a cool fold, add more color, change the paper. If people usually gloss over your hand-written sign, try an eye catching POP display. Try placing your message on an object that is related to your business. Or, use an item that showcases your competition’s weakness and send it through the mail. Think outside the box and have fun!

2.    Make it readable.

What’s the point of a catchy tagline, well-written copy, or tempting incentive if no one can read it? I was horrified when I received a postcard from a local beauty salon – it featured a very faded photo of the salon premises covered over with light colored text. So, not only was it hard to make out the photo, but the card was completely illegible. Extremely small type, all uppercase letters, and very scripty type can also put a strain on the eyes. You want to convey personality and style, but not at the expense of good taste or readability.

3.    Choose a focal point.

A great way to induce stress and confusion in customers is to have too many things going on at once. Whether you’re ordering a business card or a three-story mural, you need a single focal point. Otherwise you risk losing a person’s interest or worse yet their business, because of pure exasperation. A skilled graphic designer will be able to draw the eye to the most important information using an amazing photo, dynamic shapes, etc.

4.    Limit font usage.

Choose a versatile typeface that reflects your business style and stick with it. You may also choose a separate typeface that offers a nice contrast. If there are 6 different typefaces, 11 different sizes, and 19 different colors going on, you will come off as very unprofessional and disorganized. Don’t do it. A graphic designer will be able to suggest appropriate typefaces and the best ways to emphasize all the important parts in your text. This will strengthen your message and unify your look.

5.    Drop the clichés and show your personality.

Gather together all the brochures, ads and flyers you can find from your competition. Do you see an underlying, cookie-cutter image or color? You may find an extent of homogeneousness because people need to instantly recognize who you are and what you do. However, don’t be afraid to drop the clichés and let your unique approach or style come through (appropriate to the context).

These are just a sampling of guidelines you can use to assess your current marketing collateral, or when creating new marketing collateral for your business. Mindspring Design has a comprehensive 62-point system for creating your customized print materials. Contact Mindspring Design today for a consultation and let your brand start working for you. And remember, you are reinvesting in your business when you take time to consult with a knowledgeable graphic designer.