Nap Time Rocks!

A good navigation is a website’s potent tool. This is one valuable lesson I’ve learned in putting up my own domain. If readers can’t find their way around, it’s an easy turn off. Why? Because if I am my reader and I get confused with so many ads and navigational buttons to who knows where, I won’t stay long in that website.

This is particularly a necessary tip for businesses, especially those online. I recently raved about one of my favorite websites, a known specialty bookstore. What I didn’t rant about, however, was the fact that the buttons on the sidebar were pointing to different sections of the site (and books!), the archives search didn’t turn up anything yet, and there were only product details but NO ‘shopping cart‘.

Cardinal rule #1: Never lose the opportunity to close a sale. Even if there is no direct user and seller interface, it’s important to leave a navigational button to let your reader/customer easily make a purchase of an item. There are plenty of ecommerce software in the market and it’s not hard to install them to make shopping experience a breeze for customers.

Shopping cart software such as Ashop’s have complete support tools and even free store design offers for budding businesses. I just remembered that a lot of Multiply sellers started small and are now selling from their own websites, some with simple order forms, and some with complete shopping tools like the shopping cart.

If I weren’t a book lover I would’ve easily closed the browser and clicked on to the competitor’s website instead. But I didn’t and sent a feeback to their support instead.

Cardinal Rule #2: Always reply to your customer/reader’s feedback to let them know that things will be fixed in the soonest possible time.

That’s it for Marketing Speak! I’ll try to make this a regular topic, after all, this is what I do.