Transforming the visitor into a customer.

Let’s be honest for a bit. Web design is evolving in Mauritius at a slower pace than everywhere else. There is still a lot to do and a lot to learn. As constantly stated on the Web Design Bureau of Mauritius, there is still a gap to bridge between marketing techniques and web design here. This brings up the problem of conversion. There’s a lot of Web design companies in Mauritius and all in all you can get at least 50 new websites launched every year. The main problem is that those sites is that conversion is not maximised.

A hotel website.

Let’s take a real life example. A lot of websites are “tourism” oriented in Mauritius. These are great for promoting beaches and hotels. Below is a screenshot of one of them (I deliberately took only part of the header and the footer off to concentrate on the content) :

Looks like a normal website. There is a problem here though. No element jumps out to your face. No element drives your attention. No element makes a “call to action”. You might have read a lot about these “calls to action” but they are not yet integrated in the Mauritian “web design culture”. So what is a “call to action”. This is what really makes a site convert an visitor into a customer. It is the way a website builds its return on investment.

A call to action is that element that would take a website to a higher level. So how would it be done on the basis of our example website?

Content and conversion.

As stated before, knowing your clients’/site’s content is a must. This is the core of your website. Knowing the content will help you understand (and it is better if you work with your client) the main objective of the website and how to make it convert. In our particular example, it is obvious that the main element of the site, the one that converts, the one that makes the site work for the global enterprise is… “reservations”.

Being a hotel means that getting reservations is the most important element of the business. Thus, this should be set forward. Here the problem is that the reservations tab is nowhere to be seen at the first glance. You have to read the whole menu to find it.

Solutions

The available solutions are fairly simple. They imply knowing and understanding the aim of the website and setting some elements to the forefront. Instead of showing a redesign of our example, it might be better to show a series of inspirational “call to action buttons” that would help transforming a visitor into a customer. Note how all these are built and are set to maximize the conversion of visitors into customers.

Conclusion

As you see, all these sites have a call to action button that incites the visitor to do an action. This button stands out and grabs the visitors attention. This is one of the most common and efficient ways of converting visitors into customers.