The real challenge in understanding how to improve your website comes in installing and interpreting analytical software.  Now, I won’t drone on about all of the benefits to installing Google Analytics.  Just get it done and start to look at your traffic.

Monitoring what people are doing when they get to your site (”bouncing” vs. clicking) and where they are going can help you determine what features your site might be lacking.

What I see most often is that visitors love to click on pictures.  Pictures are incredibly important – they convey your website’s style and priorities all at once.  If your homepage images do not lead to something valuable on your website, begin there and watch the flow of the traffic.  A picture is worth a thousand clicks – a new (and bad) cliche.

OPO is about user experience.  It can be difficult to look at your own website through fresh eyes.  Try to lead users to your product as quickly as possible, while still providing the most essential information to help them stay oriented on your site.  NOTE: Users tend to read left to right, top to bottom, in English-speaking nations.  The top of your homepage needs to grab and entice immediately (without providing so many options that users bounce feeling overwhelmed).

Websites are maps to important information or a goal of some sort.  The more roadblocks there are between the user and the goal, the harder the conversion.  Make it easy to win, hard to lose, and fun to succeed.  Use attractive images, high-value space above the fold, and your own goals to pave an easy path for your users with OPO.

Today, as I was doing my usual somewhat coherent hunt through Wordpress plugins, I happened across a great little contact form utilizing AJAX and JQuery to achieve some snazzy effects. While SimpleModal Contact Form (SMCF) (contributed to the WordPress Community by Eric Martin) doesn’t allow much out of the box customization in terms of fields you can add or messages displayed straight from the admin, it’s nonetheless an impressive and slick tweak you can make to your wordpress blog or website that will enhance your visitor’s contact experience from first setup.

SMCF even checks for required fields, displays a thank you upon click ’send’ and more.

And, with the built in Wordpress Plugin Editor and a text editor, you can customize to your heart’s content – as long as you know a little php and CSS, the rest is pretty much gravy. For further customization info you can visit the WordPress Plugin Page for the SimpleModal Contact Form and refer to FAQs.

This is great for SEO because it allows fluid interaction between a visitor and a website. Your point of contact should be dynamic or all-available, meaning that it doesn’t take a user away from the page they’re on and disrupt their navigation experience.