Does a beautiful web drive sales?

Having a wonderfully designed website works wonders for impressing your visitors and feeling good about what was created, but does it drive sales?

The purpose of most websites is to make money, so it's important to make sure your site has a professional look.

The first step is to start measuring activity.  Installing Web analytics programme should be job number one. Data analysis is essential to refining your strategy.

Then you need to look at your strategy. Do you have a definitive content strategy?  You need a content strategy to provide visitors with information to win interaction.

Next step is to look at the site itself. Is it easy to navigate? Is it clear what you offer? Do you tell visitors what you want them to do?

The final and most important step is testing. Once you've identified some opportunities to clean up the site's usability, you can start testing different elements of the site like headlines, images, buttons, colours, etc. In this scenario, you'd use software like Adobe's Test & Target.

The goal of these exercises is to gradually increase your conversion rates over time. Define a strategy and work towards implementation.