As most small  business owners know by now, a website is a necessity for any small business. It puts your products and services at the fingertips of any and everyone around the world, it helps you extends your brand, and it gives your business a certain amount of gravitas.

The Gentle Nudge.  Though the overall website structure, the images and content are very import aspects of an engaging site. One of the biggest ways to increase your user engagement is to use, the call to action. The call to action can be a butt directions for your user, it tells your users what you want them do.  You can also use the call to action to incentives engagement. This works well with users who are not sure they want to contact you, by  adding an incentive or a gentle push to engage it will make them more likely to engage. After all, everyone likes a freebie.

Create an engaging structure. Before  a site can be engaging it has to be easy to understand, navigate and organized.  A well-structured website will enhance the flow of information and help in client conversion.

Be concise.  While detail can be  important a certain amount of brevity can be a good thing, especially with homepage content. Most people will spend a limit time on your home page so get your most important information up top  and leave the meater details for the internal pages whenever possible.

Minimize options. The more navigation options and links you add, the sooner you will lose the potential client. Don’t leave it to the client to choose between several menus and links as they are likely to leave  when they hit an  irrelevant page.

Don’t forget mobile. People do more on their phone than ever before. “Most new website tools ensure your site reads well on a mobile device or tablet. If you have an older website, make sure your contact info is clearly available, as that’s the most important piece of information that you want visible for your customer, “said Mickey Hayes, Owner of One World Computing Concepts.

Encourage visitor engagement.  Unfortunately, not everyone wants to have a live phone conversation. Typically, once you publish your email address on your site, the spam will soon follow. But a contact form is a great solution for clients to send you a message.

For greater engagement you can also use a chat tool.  However you must be aware that with chat, the client expects to receive an immediate response, meaning someone from your business would need to be available to respond in real time, to messages as they come in. Also if your business is not open 24/7 you will also need to prominently post chat hours so customers do not get frustrated.

It takes planning to create a successful, engaging website. So remember to take time with the design, navigation and content and also include calls to action and gentle nudges to motivate the visitor engagement.  And as always, if you need help drop us a line!