Charm, it’s one of those quaint words we don’t hear often any more. It’s a shame because there is a lot of power in the charm. By deffinition it means to delight, to enchant, to gain influence, or to be fascinating or pleasing. Think of Prince Charming, or the exotic snake charmer. It’s no wonder that throughout a good portion of the last century mother’s sent their young daughters off to classes for charm lessons.
Successful charm students learn to walk gracefully, to be polite, and to project an aura of hospitality and sweetness through a winning smile and making others feel valued and comfortable.
If you are looking for ways to bring more web visitors to your site … and keeping them there, your website may need to be more charming.
1. Best Face Foreword. Just like Mom who made gentle reminders to wash your hair, brush your teeth, and to clean up your room, your website should aslo be clean and tidy and look its best. If you have doubts or just don’t know… ask someone for their opinion. Recently I worked with a client who had been told by colleagues that their website looked homemade or unprofessional. Not a good appearance for someone who was asking customers to spend several thousand dollars on their services.
2. Accommodate Your Visitors. Does your website extend hospitality? A website makes visitors comfortable and more apt to stay when navigation and links are easy to find and use, information and resources are provided for the user’s benefit, and they can communicate freely online (imagine having a website and not giving the user a way to contact you by email!)
3. Polite Conversation. Unfortunately with the move to more relaxed communication in the language we use and the ease of the Internet, there has also been a move toward cheeky language that may be misconstrued by the web user or worse turn off the web user. Lazy, or poorly punctuated writing also puts off web visitors. Tight schedules mean that people don’t want to struggle with what they can’t read.
