Purposes and Calls to Action
A website has purpose, or at least it should. A website without purpose, will sit there and do nothing. A website needs purpose in order to accomplish anything. One mistake many people make when putting together a website for their company or association, is to ignore these purposes. They focus on looking good, or on showing off some credential, which are not un-important, but they’re not purposes. Having people call you or buy a product, that’s a purpose. Having people make reservations; That’s another purpose. It’s what you want your potential customer to do on the website.
Do you want to get people to sign up for your newsletter in exchange for a coupon they can use in the store? That’s a purpose. Do you want people to order your food online? That’s a purpose.
Without a purpose there is no way to gauge how successful your website is at doing what you want it to do, because you’re not asking it to do anything.
To get people to do anything you have to present them with something called a ‘Call to Action’. This may be as simple as a link saying [Click here to contact Restaurants Webmaster to get started] or a graphic, a banner ad, a form, lots of things. They’re ways to get people to DO something. They are a call to action. It’s a way for the site to say “Do you want to do X? Here’s how.”
One of the tricks of good website usability is in presenting effective calls to action. If people can’t figure out what they want to do, or how to do it, they’ll leave your site. If they want to be on your newsletter list, but they see no way to sign up, they might just leave, and you’ve lost a new member signup. You’ve lost a sale.
Now here is how you get started with call to action on your website, facebook page, twitter, etc.:
Start with words like:
- Sign Up
- Buy
- Register
- Try
- Subscribe
- Donate
- Call
- On Sale
To enhance and add urgency:
- Offer expires October 15th
- For a short time only
- Order now and receive something
We can help you figure out what purposes you can use your website for, we already know a few, and we’ll work with you to create calls to actions in order to have an effective and productive website. Our goal is to get a website to work for you, and presenting your users with effective Calls to Action is one very basic way to get that to happen, and it’s one that OrcaPack can help you with. Click here to get started on your path the a useful website.
