Web Site Design

10 Secrets of Online Selling

by Paul Graham

It is no accident that the people who visit your site are called "Web surfers". They have the same short attention span as TV "channel surfers". The average visitor to a Web site looks at only three or four pages before going somewhere else. Visitors will leave at the slightest obstacle.

So if you want people to visit and order from your site, don't put any obstacles in their way. Whatever you do, don't force visitors to register. You have to create yourself an account, with a user id and password, before you can even order from Wal-Mart. Do they expect online shoppers to remember a userid and password for every online store they visit?

Most major sites have learned not to require registration. They have also learned not to use frames. Frames are a lot more gratifying to the site designer than the visitor. To visitors, frames are merely confusing.

Another big disadvantage of frames: many search engines don't index sites that use frames. So using frames will decrease the amount of traffic you get from search engines.

None of the most heavily visited sites use frames. In fact, the more important the site, the simpler the design. Look at what is probably the most important site on the Web, Yahoo! There are no bells and whistles to distract you. The design of the site is so simple that you get it at a glance.

Most of your visitors will not start at your front page. Most of your hits will come from search engines, and when someone searches for a phrase in a search engine, they are sent directly to the page in your site that contains that phrase. So most of your visitors will drop right into the middle of your site, like paratroopers. The design of your site has to tell them immediately where they are, and what their choices are.

Most major sites solve this problem by putting a row of buttons at the top or down the side of each page. Somewhere, usually at the top of the page, they include a small version of their logo. The logo serves two purposes: it brands the site, and it serves as a link back to the homepage. For example, look at these interior pages from CDNOW and the NASA store. They all use this approach. So does Yahoo!. It has become the accepted convention for the way a site should be organized.

Make sure you put these links at the top of the page. You don't want new arrivals to have to scroll down to the bottom of the page just to find out where they've landed.

Many of the people who arrive at your site will be searching for a specific product. We find that almost half the people who place orders were searching for that particular product. You have to pay special attention to these visitors, because they are the ones who actually spend money. Every online store should be searchable, and there should be a search button on the home page, if not on every page. Every store with less than 2000 pages should also have an alphabetical index. (All Yahoo! stores automatically have both.)

Text copyright © 1999 Paul Graham. Feel free to reproduce any of this text on your own Web site, so long as you reproduce it verbatim, and include this message. For any other use, please contact the author. Yahoo! and Yahoo! Store are trademarks of Yahoo! Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.