What is a product page?

A product page is a page of an online shop, which contains:

• a product name
• a photo (and links to other photos)
• a description
• notes about sizes, color, specifications
• link to add the product to the shopping cart
• links and information about related products

In a way, it is vastly different from an occasional sign-up page or an article, which have clear conversion paths.

How to Improve the Product Page

Of course, the e-commerce page can be improved in any of its components.

the product name

should, obviously, describe the product ("Part 6345" or "Item_234_2" won't do)

the photo

should be suitable for the product

• for small, non-wearable items, small-medium photos are sufficient (maybe with a link to a full screen photo)
• for wearable items, the image should contain the item worn by a human and be somewhat medium and of good quality (with an obligatory link to a full-screen photo)
• luxury items, such as flats, furniture sets and so on should have medium photos (thumbnails) with links to high resolution (quality) photos

I'd say that it is important to find the balance between making product page load fast, showing the product in an appealing way and having ways to view the product in other images.

For shoes, for example, having a way to rotate it may help, while some predictable-looking goods, such as t-shirts or brushes, don't need excessive imagery.

the product description

should

• correctly guess the reason to buy the product
• highlight the benefits of buying the products
• also tie some of the unique features to the benefits

additional information about the product

should

• offer necessary options to adjust the order to the customer
• for international shops, the metrics should coincide with the measure system of the customer (inches vs centimeters, for example)
• the words used to describe the product should be understandable by the customer

the "Add to cart" link

should be clearly visible, either under the product image/description, or in the right-hand part of the screen.

related products links

should show:

• products truly related to the product
• products, complimentary to the product
• show products bought by customers, who bought this product

Ideally, all of the above should be shown (Amazon does that, I think), but special caution should be used to layout the product page, then.

provide clear path to follow

on the product page, the visitor needs to learn all the necessary info about the product, how much he's going to pay (make shipping/handling fees available upfront) and so on. He also needs to know where to head next, such as add the product to cart, to checkout, etc.

provide ways to earn trust with the visitor

customer reviews, expert and media quotes about the product help to show that your product works, is useful and how the visitor will live better, if he uses it

Improving the product description

Product description is, perhaps, the most important element of the page, as it motivates the visitor to buy the product, explains why and how it should be used and so on.

That's why it is vitally important to point out the benefits of owning the product, ways to use it and also inspire the customer to buy it by using call to action.

Some even suggest that product description should educate the customer, while suggesting a way to use the newly-gained knowledge. This approach is a good one, but is suitable about the products that require education.

For simple items, the education is about providing the benefits of the very product and, possibly, by providing articles in another section of the site.

More information

Generally, the basic principles of an ideal product page are:

• focus: create the page about the product and the customer
• enough useful information: provide any information that a visitor needs before buying
• clear conversion path: have only one way to convert to the customer (add to cart, most likely)
• build trust: on the site and on the page, sprinkle information to earn trust with the visitor (reviews, quotes, personal information, informal information, etc)
• offer ways to choose related products to add to cart

Rounding up

When improving the product pages of your online shop, the only thing you need to remember about is the convenience for your visitors. They need to be comfortable with buying from you, which means you need to provide sufficient information (both about the product and about the seller). So, you need not only to follow the beaten path of design optimization, but also look at your page from the point of view of your customer and improve accordingly.

You can read more about improving a product page, which can serve as a landing page, here:

• E-Commerce Site Design: The Product Page
• Increase Landing Page Conversion Rates
• Optimizing Site Design (case studies, research and results)
• Great Tips for Increasing Online Conversion Rates - Educate and Guide Your Customers
• How To Make Sales Online by Directly Answering Your Customer’s Biggest Questions

The whole experience of having a popular article allowed me to gain a better understanding of how I could improve my articles, as well as site and hosting performance.
<!--break-->

How this site was improved based on comments

Here's what site visitors from social sites have advised to improve and what I have done on the site:

• reducing the font size (did from 12pt to 10pt Verdana)
• removing boldness from the links (now they aren't as bold as they used to be)
• reducing the width of the content area (added another column)

Of course, as it often happens, while giving out advice on making text readable, I have omited my own site. So, the critique was rather deserved.

The only caveat is that some said that 100% width "suxors", but I still think that fluid expandable site is more usable, than fixed layout. Of course, it doesn't mean that the content area should be way too wide, hence, why it was decreased. If more people complain, I'll add margins and still have a fluid width layout.

Also, it was noted that nothing draws the visitors in on this site. As long as I think that unrelated graphics distract readers from the content and I can't find a decent, visually appealing design/Drupal theme, I can't change this site appearance, sadly.

I will test how effective a graphical layout is against this text-based one on this very site later, when I have time to setup the tracking system, though.

The Digg Effect and site performance

Of course, right during the Digg effect I had to learn

• how to improve Drupal performance
• what hosting is more suitable for sites with bursts of traffic (or just high-traffic)
• how to tune LAMP (Linux, Apache, MySQL and PHP) for performance

Right after the traffic levels dropped to reasonable levels and my site was alive again, I tweaked Drupal performance settings a tad more, thus letting it live through an equally large wave of visitors the next day.

I also learned alot about improving site performance - I'll be writing up a review later. While I am currently not able to do all advised, I will do anything as soon as I get a more stable hosting.

Can you use social sites to improve your site?

After all the race of improving the website has ended, it got me thinking. Can social sites be used to improve article content, website usability and site and server performance?

Create value for the social site audience

Before you get anything, you need to create a valuable article/post (that's a whole another story), but if you ask for any feedback about the article (content, style, formatting, etc), you may get some constructive ideas.

Ask for feedback

The key thing here is actually asking for feedback on improving the article, acting accordingly and responding to comments, both on the social site pages and under your article/post. Of course, the comments should be enabled for it, too.

See through rudeness to gain insight

Of course, some may leave rather derogatory, snarky remarks, but I'd suggest also to learn from them, instead of being offended. If you are pretty sensitive, I'd suggest growing thick skin or at least preparing yourself before embarking on this experiment or reading comments at all.

Improve site performance

So, apart from your site content, you can use the so-called "Digg Effect" - the effect of receiving thousands of visitors every hour and thus straining the server - to observe your website speed bottlenecks and improve hosting and website performance.

The thing is, though, that you can't and shouldn't ask your site visitors on how to improve your site performance. The topic is pretty deep and depends on the site software/hosting, not to mention that most of your site visitors may not know a thing on improving web site speed.

Rounding up

Though not everyone can get an article noticed on popular social websites, such as Digg, Del.icio.us, Reddit, StumbleUpon, Slashdot, etc and, perhaps, extra server/hosting load may not be welcome (especially on a shared hosting, or when you host all or most of your websites on a single server), receiving thousands of visitors in a matter of days, asking for feedback and listening to the people can greatly help you improve your content, style, formatting and also site performance.

Stay tuned for an in-depth review-article on improving your site performance some time next week, too.

Stumble!

What is website usability?

Anyway, what's this usability thing?

Put simply, usability is about making the site easy for your visitors. The easiness is about understanding what the site is about, navigating to what the visitor needs and doing what both site visitor and owner want.

There are many ways you can improve your site usability:

• use simple language
• use clear link labels
• provide easy site navigation
• use understandable site structure
• have objective site content
• have pages focused on one thing
• provide clear click paths
• always have an obvious way to contact you
• show your photo, some personal information on the "About" page

Well, you get the drift. How you know do you get from usability?

Benefits of usability

As you can grasp from the above examples, visitors of a usable website can find what they want quicker and do what they want easier as well. This happens when your potential customers know what your website has to offer, the benefits of your offer, begin to trust you and they see a simple way to buy from you.

Naturally, improved site usability increases your site sales. A nice thing to know is that you increase sales by improving your conversion rate (the total number of visitors to the number of customers). You not only don't need extra traffic for this, but you can improve your conversion rate from 1% to 2%-3% (there's no official limit, really). Which means you can increase your sales by 100-300% by improving your website usability.

But usability doesn't just foster conversion sales. Simple language, clear text labels and using the words your customers use to describe your product, you can increase your website traffic as well. Traffic will come, because you will be easier to find from the search engines. Some claim that the traffic boost will be about 100-150% as well.

Improved usability also reduces the amount of time required to develop your website, since you won't need to tweak your site later a lot on visitor demand.

How to improve usability

There are numerous ways you can improve your site usability.

Usability learning

One is to study various usability resources, such as usability.gov, usabilitynews.com, credibility.stanford.edu, etc. and implement various tested guidelines, trusted techniques on your website. You may also read usability sections on forums, such as Cre8asiteForums, Search engine watch, etc. You can not only ask for opinions, but also read shared knowledge and read articles that people link to.

Usability user testing

Another is to use user testing (calling your visitors, readers and potential customers 'users' may be harsh, but that's the usability terminology..use what you like to improve it). Basically, you need to tell your usability test participants to do something specific (purchase your software) or answer a specific question (what's the main reason to use your software?).

You need to check the time it'll take your testing people to complete the tasks and see what difficulties they overcome to do what you both want. Such usability testing sessions can be real eye-opening sometimes.

Hiring a usability consultant

And, of course, (what'd you expect) is to hire a website usability developer or consultant. This way you get to use the knowledge, accumulated in years, and skills, improved with time (like wine), to improve your website.

Benefits and advantages

Each way of improving your site usability has its benefits and disadvantages. When learning usability yourself, you can do everything the same yourself (and save money), but it takes time. When running a user testing session, you need to know what to look for in visitor behaviour, but critical faults may be found anyway. Website usability expert is a fast and a reliable method, but costly. Each to his own, I guess.

Rounding up

Though website usability isn't something you hear often, it doesn't mean it should be neglected. By recognizing the issue now, you can be way ahead of 80-95% of your rivals, which may be a very appealing competitive edge. If you think usability isn't for you, try making small changes in the right directions and test their effectiveness, as only by seeing real results you'll be more confident in improving your site usability.

What is a click path?

A click path is the sequence of links a site visitor follows, once landing on any of your pages (from the SERPs or not). To ensure that your visitor gets what he/she wants, you need to provide clear links on the landing page for the visitor to learn more or do any action he/she desires. To do this effectively, you need to follow a few basic rules.

Place links visibly

As much as it sounds awkward, it is as efficient. If you are familiar with a notion of eye tracking, you know that people view pages from top to bottom and from left to right (unless they read from right to left, then the pattern is different). So, your best bet would be to place links to learn more or do anything should be placed in the top-left part of your page, or the closest you can place them.

Also, you need to put the links above the fold (the visible part of a page, when the visitor hasn't started scrolling). While some say that visitors do scroll, you'd rather not risk it and make your link more visible as per advice above.

Have good text/background contrast

While this may sound as an excessive measure to increase visibility, having a low contrast text color can only work with people with 100% eyesight in ideal conditions. How many of your clients have those?

Standard contrast colors are black text on white background. It is the best readable combination and also the most familiar one. While you can deviate slightly (by making your text dark blue or other colors), you shouldn't go way too far.

Read more about choosing colors for your design.

Use the right words

Once your links are noticed, you need to make sure your visitors understand them. "Big deal!" I hear. The matter is, though, that your customers may not be experts in your field. They have their own lives and experiences. Consequently, they relate their own sets of words with your product.

Researching keywords using various tools can give you a glimpse of what words your customers use, so you could use them on your site. (This should be the primary purpose of using the tools, in my opinion, but I digress.)

Make it easy to understand

While using the right keywords, you should also use very simple words or synonyms, which should simplify your text and make it astonishingly easy to read and understand. The people will appreciate your care and will return it with their actions.

The point of understanding your customers is critical. You need to speak their mind, their language and deliver the kind of information and links they need at the right place and moment.

Create paths

Once you have learned the basics before creating click paths, you need to remember this one: provide the information the visitor might need or link to the most probably pages he/she may want to visit. To do this, you need to take into account:

• where the visitor has come from (a Google Ad, another website or from organic search)
• in what stage of the buying process the visitor is (researching, comparing, learning more, looking to buy, etc)
• what kind of information the visitor needs (related products, product reviews, license pricing, etc)
• what existing page content says
• what would be the most logical next page to visit

Of course, each page is unique. And when a unique visitor lands on it, it creates a very unique situation you may not encounter for a while. This only means that you need to learn as much as you can about your customers and offer any necessary information and links your site visitors may need.

Use call to action

Another important moment to remember is to use call to action when creating links. Call to action is when you ask people to do something, such as to 'use call to action'.

For example, when confronted with advice or a request to read the article, people are more likely to follow the link and read the article, than acting on their own, if you just mention the other article.

On business websites, call to action should at least be used to inspire people to add products to shopping carts, learn more about the products, contact the website owner, buy the products or email their friends about a good deal on a website. Naturally, call to action can be used in all imaginary cases whenever you need people to do something - the only rule here is that they should be getting something in return.

Thanks, Steve, for reminding me about using call to action.

Rounding up

By truly understanding what your site visitors needs at any moment of time, you can create quite elaborate click paths, which should give your site visitor any information desired. Naturally, you will also improve your site internal structure as well as conversions.

Please note that this post only covered how 'read more' kind of links should be created. You still need to consider how well your website copy is written, which words you use in it and where and what you have to offer to your potential customers.

Want to see how your visitors view your site? Read about web analytics basics and advanced stuff at PronetAdvertising.com

Read some great tips about web analytics from Lee Odden of TopRankBlog.com

Learn how understanding click path helps you better understand how to place these helpful links and such.

What proof?

Since starting my blog, I have been watching the stats closely. Though it is interesting to see the sources of traffic and keywords people use to find my site, it is also interesting to see what people (or you) are doing on my site, too.

Long story short, here are the stats about experience of my blog visitors:

Previous full month stats:

• 2.87 visits per visitor
• 3.17 pages per visit
• average time on site: 5min 8sec per visit
• Total pages read per visitor: ~9.1 pages
• Total time spent on site per visitor: 14min 45 sec

This month stats:

• 2.46 visits per visitor
• 2.33 pages per visit
• average time on site: 4min 48sec per visit
• Total pages read per visitor: 5.73 pages
• Total time spent on site per visitor: 11min 48 sec

What does it all mean?

Considering that most of my posts are fairly long, the stats clearly show that on average, people are reading for about 4-5 minutes every visit. Also, they are reading a couple of pages every visit. Not only that, but they also return 2-3 times to spend some time reading the articles.

This all means that when people are clearly interested in the subject and want to learn something useful for them, they read a lot easily.

Of course, I don't have statistics on whether they read most of the articles on their first or last visits. Or whether they just scan articles in one minute and spend the rest 3-4 minutes finding where to go next. I only have the stats you have just read about.

Moreover, you need to remember the following: with more traffic, less people stick around. Or more people bounce in the first 30 seconds. That's natural.

Musings

Now, the key question is: why people read so much here, while everyone keeps saying that they hate reading? The answers are simple, really.

First of all, the blog seems to be interesting and useful. Otherwise, no one would be reading it - that's for sure.

Secondly, the posts are formatted in a way that they could be easily scanned - read quickly from point to point. This can be done by using subheadings, breaking paragraphs to 2-3 sentences and also trying writing in a simple language (which I hope I do, otherwise do let me know).

Considering that the bookmark rate of the blog is around 40% (62.7% in Jan, 41.8 in Feb, 37.2% this month), it is pretty obvious how people return to my site. Of course, I often see people returning to Google and using the same keyphrase to find me again.

Of course, to make it easier for people to return to the blog, I could have chosen a shorter domain name and also put a reminder to bookmark this site (should do so now, I guess?).

Rounding up

I am not sure whether writing shorter posts is more preferrable, really. In my opinion, how useful the article/post is matters most. Then formatting plays a large role, because I have frequently observed myself ignoring posts with very long paragraphs.

I am guessing a good recipe would be to write the posts, then trim them down to what you wanted to say and format them for the Web. Then you give your visitors a chance to stick around.

Benefits of usable content

Improving your site usability can help you attract visitors from the search engines, because you will essentially use the words that your visitors use when (re)writing your copy. Moreover, when improving usability, you will add more unique, quality content that will cover a larger part of The Long Tail of Search and attract a broader range of visitors. Also, quality content will attract a number of one-way incoming links, allowing your site to rank higher for your keywords.

When your site is more usable than the other 85%-90% of sites, your potential customer starts to think "Hmm, the owner of this site does think about how happy I am when visiting the site." Such train of thought leads to the fact that more visitors start to value a site and will be more likely to become the site clients.

Another benefit is that happy people can link to the site, thus increasing your search engine rankings and, consequentially, driving more targeted traffic to your site.

Providing value

The key point of website usability is providing value to your visitors. In order to attract more search engine visitors to your site, you need to use the words they use while searching for your kind of products. Also, when you figure out what interests your potential customers, you need to create content, aimed to provide value to your visitors, using the keywords they use. This way you not only attract extra targeted visitors, but increase the chances of converting them to your customers noticeably.

Who to write for?

Though it may be obvious that site content needs to be written to the visitors, it is only the tip of an iceberg. To really engage a reader, you should imagine your most valuable customer in your mind and write specifically for him. This way, it will not only be very valuable reading, but it will help you to stick to the point. Investigating customer's interests, the words they use to describe a product or service, are key to capturing the reader's attention. Basically, the choice of words to use in the text determins how targeted your visitors will be.

Though how easy and quickly a visitor can find what he wants is the most important for a website, website content is still the path the site potential client takes during his visit, so it shouldn't be neglected.