Listen, if anyone tells you that your website isn’t as important as printed marketing materials they’re dead wrong. Your website is your online identity and its look needs to match the branding of your company. How you setup the site and the visual elements directly effects the kind of traffic you get on the website. Key components and information about your company should be accessible.

Here are some things to watch out for when you’re putting a site together:

• If you have a search box, make sure it’s placed in a position that makes sense. Search boxes are very useful to have on a large scale website because it allows people to find the information they need quicker.
• You should absolutely have a phone number somewhere obvious on the website. Don’t bury your number deep within contact areas. Always consider placing the phone number somewhere near the top right of the website.
• Break up your content so that it’s readable. You have to realize that when people come to your website they are looking for particular pieces of information. They’re not coming to your website to read everything you have up there. They’re coming to you to find an answer to a very specific question. So, breaking up the content into different blocks or adding sub-headings helps people navigate your website easier.
• Widen your color palette beyond 2 colors. Look, some of us out there like to have things as uniform as possible, but in the marketing world you need buttons and other elements of your website to jump out at people. Now, I’m not suggesting that you use bright neon colors (please don’t do that). Just think about your marketing goals and understand how people browse a website.

Keeping your site in line with the companies goals is an important part of the overall process.

Websites are meant to bring in traffic and revenue. Don’t spend your money developing one if you’re not willing to think outside of the box.

There are some good books out there that describe the impact of usability on everything we do. Consider this, you’re at home on the couch and it’s late at night. You decide it’s time for bed so you reach over to your televisions remote to turn it off. When you reach for the off button where does your thumb go? Most likely, if it’s a usable remote, your thumb reaches up to the top left of the device.

Well, why did you do that? Without even thinking you already knew where to go because this has become a standard on all products throughout the world. Let’s say we change the standard and now the power button is located in the bottom right.

Does that make sense? Of course not! Why is that? Because developers thought about this a long time ago. It doesn’t make any sense at all to have to make people use to hands to turn the power on our off. Some people like holding the remote while they’re watching TV. With a power button in the bottom right position, it’s a guarantee that someone out there would be getting rather upset that they keep turning off their television on accident.

Look, we’ve standardized things for a reason. When you’re building a website, don’t reinvent the wheel. People are already attached to standards and expect various pieces of information, like a phone number, to be located somewhere near the top right of the website. Make smart decisions and the customers will keep coming back to your website.

E-commerce is something that almost all business owners are after. The point of developing a website for your company is to bring in traffic and ultimately use it as a tool to bring in more business. Building a store into your website is one of the fastest growing requests in the Web development world. All kinds of companies ranging from handmade soap developers to kids self esteem programs are capitalizing on a user base that likes to do, find and get everything all in one place.

It’s simple enough to request a store be added as a part of your projects scope, but the real tricky part is setting it up in a way that will convert users and increase your sales. Some will argue that on-site stores aren’t the answer, and in 3 years they might not be, but for now this is where the industry is headed and you have to be hip to the trends.

So, how can it be the “ultimate e-commerce tool”? Well, it’s going to take a great deal of time to organize the thoughts of the designer and the rest of the development team. If you’re utilizing this kind of tool then it’s important that you have a few spots on your home page to entice users to visit the products area of your website. This could be in the form of an elegant button located in the top right area of your site or a featured product box in a sidebar or somewhere else so long as its above the fold.

You can use all kinds of other marketing tactics such as offering freebies if they purchase a product now. This is a great way to pull people in. If they can get something for free without having to do a whole lot of work than that can be big, especially if they like what they’re receiving. They’ll say good things about the company and direct other people to the site who might be interested. Word of mouth, in my opinion, is the most important piece of the small business puzzle. If you have a great website that has some interesting offers and you’re visitors are pleased, then wouldn’t you agree that Web usability could very well be the ultimate e-commerce tool?

Use Web usability to direct traffic towards the areas of your website that you want them to go. This is how you get customers to convert.