Is your website working for or against you?

For most small businesses, particularly home-based ones, an effective website is your storefront. It’s your face to the world and only chance to make a first impression.

It needs to be working for you, not against you.

Every single piece of website traffic a small business attracts is crucial. Just getting people to visit your site is enough of a challenge, but once they’re there you want to do everything in your power to ensure they take action toward becoming a client.

You have a few options. There are brochure sites, which essentially are an online version of a flier or physical brochure you would hand out. They are informative and may include a call to action, but they’re not interactive and don’t include an e-commerce component.

If you have products to sell and want to include a shopping cart, you need a more complex site.

Whichever type of site fits your business best, there is more to a good site than simply being aesthetically pleasing. It needs to be functional. It needs to accomplish the goal of closing business.

Tiny, nearly imperceptible elements of a page can have a big impact on how visitors interact with it. For example, changing the color on a “buy now” button can markedly improve how many times it’s clicked; rearranging photos or changing fonts can do the same.

Making these types of changes in a disciplined way is what marketers call A/B testing (because it compares version A to version B).

Many more fascinating examples can be viewed on sites like www.whichtestwon.com — and from them, lessons can be learned.