One of the things I find important is that our visitors have a pleasant stay when coming on our website. I feel that the user experience should be great, because I’m convinced that it’s a good way to make a connection and gain trust, which finally can result in improved sales of our eBooks and Video Workshops.
With a “great user experience” I mean that the website should be calm and predictable, without continuously appearing pop-up windows asking for registration to newsletters, offering discounts, or proposing not-to-be-missed once-in-a-lifetime offers, and without sudden advertisement slide-ins or other moving items that disturb tranquil reading of the content of an article.
I often see websites that are so full of distracting items coming up randomly that you lose track of what you’re actually doing on the website or even don’t get the time to just simply read or find what you were looking for. It’s incredibly annoying and I think it’s actually one of the worst things you can do as a website owner. On top of that it also makes a website slow and unpleasant to navigate.
I also feel that it’s out of the question to track users’ activity on the website through cookies or other techniques. That may be helpful to pop-up even more so-called “targeted advertisement” but we value people’s privacy high and don’t engage in those types of activities. I mean, tracking visitors’ activity — in my opinion — falls under the category of a very unpleasant user experience.
We also try to keep our website as uniform as possible by which I mean that you can find menu entries at the same location, that articles have a similar structure, and that our own native eBooks or Video Workshop ads always have the same look and feel. Predictability gives certainty and certainty gives a trusting and familiar feeling and that’s key to building a website audience, especially if you are a small independent creator and publisher.
Transparency is another topic that falls under the flag of user experience. It’s about the products you sell by which I mean that we try to give as much as factual information as possible about a book or video without lies (or not telling everything a prospective buyer should actually know) and without trying to beautify a product in cunning ways. I think that being dishonest about what you sell will always bounce back in your face.
It’s better to not sell a product than to sell one the buyer isn’t happy with, simply because you didn’t give enough information about what you exactly sell. It doesn’t always help, I need to admit that, because my experience is that people don’t always read the product descriptions well and then might end up being unsatisfied with what they bought. But okay, that’s something I can’t really avoid.
Anyway, presenting a good website user interface and trying to offer a pleasant user experience is one of our key objectives with the website, one that needs continuous efforts and which is always subject to improvement. Over time you learn better and better what’s important for visitors and that’s something you always need to stay tuned to.
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