If You Really Must Have a Design, (Im)Prove It

You may feel very strongly that your website should look a certain way. But the fact is, it doesn’t matter what you think. It doesn’t matter what your designer thinks, either. And it doesn’t matter what your webmaster thinks. What matters is what your customers think. And the best way to find out what they think of the design of any aspect of your website is to test it.

Google has an excellent, totally underutilized, free tool called Google Website Optimizer. This software allows you to continually test different combinations of your site’s content – both text and images – to determine how small changes might increase the number of people buying from you.

Whether you use this tool or some other method to test your design elements, DO test them. Testing gives you an objective measurement of how your customers think. Once you know what works – and doesn’t work – with them, you can mix and match to improve the performance of your website and online marketing campaigns.

[Ed. Note: David Cross is Senior Internet Consultant to Agora Inc. in Baltimore . You can meet all your marketing goals - and achieve all your personal, social, financial, and business dreams - with the help of ETR's Total Success Achievement program . Learn more by clicking here.]

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