Support Article ID: 81283
GTP iCommerce has been consulting and designing web sites since 1996. We work with large and small businesses on web sites that improve their lead generation, sales conversion and streamline service delivery.
Here are some golden editing rules that are tried and true. Use these tips when you are working with your new GTP website.
A key to web site design is - keep it simple. Make it easy for your web site visitors to navigate quickly and easily to the areas that interest them with a clear navigational framework. You’ve probably got less than 3 seconds to get them clicking, and if your visitor spends those 3 seconds figuring out what to click, they may simply click the back button. So keep it simple!
At GTP we build simple-to-use web sites for you. We group similar information together so that your online shop product information is in one section and your support information is in another section, your customers can then browse and buy easily.
Because web sites are all very different; it is important to keep the design, colours, fonts and styles consistent across all pages so visitors know they are still on your site. With your GTP iCommerce web site, the design and navigation is automatically handled for you. But because you have the freedom of changing font sizes and styles, you can unwittingly break the professional look of your site. We recommend using the styles section of the content manager to keep headings, subheadings and text (body copy) on your web site consistent.
While your GTP site comes with the ability to edit fonts – Don’t! If you want a font style throughout your site let us set it across the site for you. This will keep your site consistent, ensure you look professional, and save you time. For emphasis you can bold, underline or italicise some text.
When pasting from Microsoft Word make sure you use the "strip font tags tool" in the editor and "clear code" tool so the style sheets made for your web site will work for you. A special "strip word content" link is located on most pages in the content manager as well..
Images can make your site look fantastic (or make your site a mess, if not done incorrectly) so you must prepare your images properly. Common mistakes include stretching, pixelation and blurring. Only use images that are cropped to the right size, are sharp and in focus, and will make you look professional.
Images done right will highlight and enrich your content, giving visitors another opportunity to connect with you and your business. Images done wrong will turn off visitors and reduce the response rate. No image is better than a bad image.
Copywriting can seem challenging to the new web site owner. Write your copy as though you are talking to your customer. Think about what you say when you are selling your product and simply write this down. Put your customers questions as questions above your answers and style as a subhead (Header 3 or Header 4 in editor). Use plenty of words like ‘you’ and ‘your’.
Research what other web sites in your industry say, and re-write these to suit your company. Sometimes it’s best to write the copy yourself and then hand it over to someone else to edit it. Whether this be a professional copywriter or someone else in your office - you should get the general idea of your message down and then a professional copywriter can put the polish on it.
The key goal of your web site should be to capture email addresses. You can then keep in touch and top of mind in your prospective customers minds. When they are ready to buy, you will be considered.
Your GTP web site comes with email capture tools and builds for you an email database automatically. All you need to do is come up with a relevant incentive to give you their address. Your GTP site also allows you to create email newsletters and send these out to your list, and offers a range of email auto responder tools you can use.
Providing links to valuable resources is a way to provide extra value to your customers. You can also use it to build a link referral network with other reputable web sites to improve your traffic and search engine rankings. But be warned - avoid rubbish sites that only provide link swaps and signing on to web sites that are predominantly link share content. Your search engine rankings could suffer.
You can easily add links to other sites from your GTP content management pages and if you need assistance give us a call.
Your GTP web site is well coded to get into the search engines. We automatically generate most of your metatags based to contain targeted keywords. You may be able to improve your results by tweaking your web site’s metatags (which is the information a search engine reads when indexing your web site). You can do this using GTPs built in meta tag editing tools which analyses copy on a page to give you the best metatags, so your job is easy.
Other simple things you can do to improve search engine performance are to bold keywords and link keywords to other pages on your own site. You can do this using your web sites GTP content management system.
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