A great website should be like a good butler --butlers anticipate needs and work silently, as a good website should. I learned this analogy from an old book, Designing from Both Sides of the Screen. (Amazing how fast our world turns now. It's only from 2001, but the book feels ancient. In fact, one of our biggest problems is that technology advances faster than we can keep up with it.)

I used the the first chapter of the book to summarize many best practices for conversion on line. Remember that once the visitor is
at our sites, our goal is to convert him -- to turn him into a buyer or a lead. To help him take action. Here are some highlights of
the chapter, which I've rewritten to be web specific:

Respect physical effort: Don't offer the visitor product if you don't have it for sale yet. Don't ask the visitor to click if she doesn't
have to - clicks are sacred. Remember where the customer was in the clickstream (so if they put something into the shopping cart,
and decide to continue shopping, return them to where they were before they visited the cart). Remember information the visitor
tells you for the entire site visit.

Respect mental effort: Don't give people too much to look at or they will look at none of it. (This is especially true for on-site
search.) Make common tasks prominent. Give feedback and show progress ("You are on step 1 of 2.") Follow conventions even if
you don't love them (for example, an asterisk has come to mean, "required field". Companies who try to violate that convention
have trouble getting conversions.) Start with smart preferences instead of asking for them all the time (bargain shopping sites
should start with search ordered from cheapest to most expensive - a smart preference for a bargain site.)

Be Helpful: Accept information in many formats (can't we be a little more forgiving in the way we accept telephone numbers and
credit cards?) When you can't accept many formats, tell people ahead of time, and make sure that the instructions mean the same
thing to them as they do to you. Don't make people re-enter all their information after they enter one piece of it wrong (doesn't it
drive you batty to fill out a whole form and have it come back empty because you forgot the three-digit code on the back of your
credit card?) Don't blame the customer. Request only the information you absolutely need. Explain in the customer's language, not yours.

Robbin Steif, CEO
LunaMetrics