Everyone perceives things in a different way. That’s why the take-away from your website needs to come in many forms.

Fifteen years ago, websites were pretty much just text (albeit occasionally multi-colored) and small images.

Thanks to broadband Internet access and compression technology, website developers can include higher quality and larger graphics without sacrificing an end-user’s load speed.

That speed also means there are other senses and attention spans to address.

Thanks to companies like YouTube, online video is more than a marketing tool. For some people it’s a way of life.

Video allows you to show and tell at the same time.

Audio, while obviously part of video, can be used alone for its own punch (think radio before TV).

The best practice now, concerning audio and video on a website, is to let the user decide whether to press play. Think of the times you’ve gone to a site and can’t figure out how to turn off the music or video.

If you’re telling viewers to click play in the right way, you will get a high percentage of plays without annoying someone and keeping them away.

Are there elements of your company you can show online? Do audio recordings make sense for your business to have online?

Let the Albany web design experts help out with your audio, video and other marketing needs.

Have you ever been to one of those direct sales parties?

There are a lot of different themes out there for these shindigs, many of which are geared toward women – makeup parties, jewelry parties, cookware parties, and the like. If you’ve never experienced one of these functions, it’s a regular party with a very large elephant in the room – a sales person, peddling a line of products to the attendees.

For the hosts of these get-togethers, the goal (besides enjoying their friends’ company, of course) is to get their guests to buy things. The more things the partygoers buy, the more freebies the host or hostess receives. So at a direct sales party, the deliciousness of the food and the excitement of the conversation may not be the host’s primary concerns – she’s often paying more attention to how much money her friends are dishing out.

Party Time on Your Site

Since you are most likely selling goods or services through your website, you’re in a position similar to that of a typical sales party host. You want people to show up to your party, you want them to have a good time while they’re there, but you don’t want them to leave without buying something. Having a lot of people party down on your site is a good thing, but what you’re really looking for are conversions.

So what can you do to point your party people in the right direction?

The Proper Balance of Business and Fun

There’s enough fun at a typical direct sales party to attract a decent crowd. Some snacks, some drinks, maybe some tunes on the stereo. But it’s not a rave. And keg stands, bouncy houses, and ice luges usually aren’t in the picture. There’s entertainment, but not so much craziness that people forget to check in with the salesperson.

Your website should be designed the same way. You want to attract visitors, but not distract them. By designing with selling in mind, you can have a website with enough going on to entice visitors to look around, but not so much clutter that they lose sight of the reason they came. Conversions will happen naturally if your site is well-designed with minimal distractions and plenty of positive suggestions that encourage your visitors to get shopping.

And like the host of a gourmet chocolate direct sales party, if you set everything up right, you can end up with plenty of sweet rewards.

For a change of pace, let’s talk about real estate open houses today.

When a home is for sale, realtors hold open houses to get it sold. There are tours and balloons and snacks and it makes for a super little Saturday.

While a seller’s agent would certainly enjoy seeing a house full of open house visitors, the ultimate goal of the open house is to sell the house, not to throw a great party. So while a full house is great, the real estate agent is likely to gauge the effectiveness of the open house by figuring out how many attendees actually took a step toward buying the house as a result of their visit. How many took home brochures? How many scheduled another viewing? How many made offers?

As You Probably Guessed, I’m Really Talking About Websites

Think of your website as that real estate open house. If your SEO is going well, chances are, you’ve got an open house full of people visiting your site. But what you really want is for those people to take steps toward giving you business.

These steps are called “conversions.”

Let’s say your website sells water guns. When someone clicks from your homepage to the page about your new model, that’s a conversion. When that person adds the new gun to his shopping cart, that’s another conversion. And when he completes the process and actually buys the water gun, that’s also a conversion.

Real estate agents want lots of visitors to their open houses, and business owners want lots of visitors to their sites. But just as realtors need visitors to do more than just chat and chow down on the open house food, business owners need visitors to do more than take in the beauty of their sites. Real estate agents want to give out pamphlets and collect bids, and business owners want website conversions.