Just as your brick-and-mortar storefront is a representation of your company and often the first impression shoppers get of you, your website acts in much the same way for the online shopping experience. You go to great lengths to ensure your physical store is clean, organized and staffed with friendly representatives, so shouldn’t your website also enhance the customer’s experience? If your building layout is prohibiting consumers from satisfactorily and conveniently perusing your shelves for what they need, you’d make it better, right? But what if the tools and features of your website are keeping customers from doing business with you? Would you listen to your consumers and improve your site based on their recommendations?

When your website doesn’t perform well or meet expectations, it is time to reevaluate your design/development and initiate some basic changes that will enhance the user experience and jumpstart your online success. If your site is poorly designed or developed, this could be the difference maker in customers choosing your competition versus you. Overall, your site should strive for a quality user experience. If it doesn’t achieve this, you could be losing business. But many companies think they have to completely gut their sites and engage in massive overhauls to achieve better results. Mastering the basics will help you see improvements to your online success. If, at a later time, you want to go into more in-depth revisions, these basic improvements can carry over into your new design to serve your customers better.

1. Determine your target audience.

Take a step back. Look at your overall business. For whom are your marketing efforts tailored? Who are your primary customers? Who is visiting your site? What is your primary demographic?

By answering these questions, you should be able to determine your target audience. Once you determine this, you can better gauge if your user interface is constructed in such a way to enhance your customers’ online experience. Perhaps your site needs improvements in the form of navigational tools, copy that speaks to your primary customers, or video and audio clips. For example, if your target audience is seniors, then your site shouldn’t feature tools that only Web-savvy users will understand. In fact, your site should be simplified to create a better user experience. In this case, your copy should also be free of technical, industry jargon to better relate to your end users. Remember that each visitor to your site has different needs and comes from a different background. To better understand these different needs, consider hosting an online feedback form or survey, featuring an e-mail address to welcome comments and suggestions, or creating focus groups to pinpoint issues with your site. Then, you can move forward with confidence knowing what your users think, and you can revise accordingly.

2. Your website isn’t a one-man show.

The problem with many sites is that they are designed and written by one person or department. For better results, encourage participation from everyone on your team or within your company. What your designers have an eye for differs from the focus of your customer service department. To create the best user experience, it is often necessary to get feedback from those who interact with customers on a daily basis. Based on their frontline experiences on the shop floor, your order fulfillment and shipping departments might have worthwhile suggestions for your website. If your company is larger, create a simple feedback process to streamline the data-gathering process. And when the time comes to implement your internal recommendations, create a team that is combined of employees from all backgrounds. Also, have your designers, developers, SEO specialists, writers and content strategists partner to create an online experience that fosters the ability to get found by searching consumers; easy navigation; and engaging, page-turning content. When your site is in the staging phase, have different members test the site for usability.

3. Implement content that speaks to your audience and doesn’t preach above them.

While website aesthetics are important, content is still a top motivator in convincing consumers to do business with you, yet many companies don’t give it the appropriate attention. In fact, content is a simple, cost-effective way to enhance the user experience, as long as you understand your target audience. When visitors enter your site, are they presented with a clear picture of what your business is and what it sells? Or does misinformation or a lack of information present a cloudy perception, causing the user to exit your site for a competitor’s site? Content should be optimized, organized and consumer focused. Put yourself in your customers’ shoes and organize your content according to what your users need. Have a writer construct the copy, not a designer, and focus on creating a dialogue with your customers. Your writer should work closely with an SEO department and a content strategist so everyone is on board with the project goals. And your writer should also coordinate with the designer/developer to move the site in the right direction. At the end of the day, everyone should be focusing on the same thing — creating optimal experiences with your brand.

Every content element on your site should be complementary, ultimately directing your customers — like a virtual tour guide — through each page and from one piece of information to the next. The content should also complement the design and development elements of your site to streamline user navigation. Your content should enhance the user experience so much that your shoppers click through to the final destination — the call to action — and increase your sales conversions. Read my recent blog post about the balance of website design and content for the creation of a better user experience. In this post, I focus on how aesthetics impact the user’s impression of your site in the first 50 milliseconds, as well as how to find a narrative voice and tone for your copy.