14 nice things you can do for your customers

I make no promises. But I suspect if you do some of this stuff, your customers will thank you. Or, they won’t notice the stuff that used to make them curse you:

1. Make every page on your site load 1 second faster. Start by taking every image on your site and compressing it. Please. It makes a difference.
2. Accept PayPal. Just because you hate it doesn’t mean they do.
3. Do a little basic typography: Increase line spacing, use a bigger font. Make your site easy to read.
4. Put no more than 15 words on a line. See above.
5. Put no more than 5 lines in a paragraph.
6. Break up your page. Use lists, images, subheads and such. Don’t give them one big blob of images or text.
7. If they ask you a question on Twitter or Facebook, answer it.
8. If they compliment you on Twitter or Facebook, say thanks.
9. Instead of giving them a discount, give them a better product.
10. Before you pay $45000 to redesign your web site, pay $4500 to make the existing site easier to use. Then use what you learned on the new site.
11. Don’t even imply that your customers have to log in before they can buy. Put that stuff at the very end of the checkout process, on the ‘thank you’ page.
12. Trade ‘elegance’ or ‘personality’ for ‘clarity’ and ‘obviousness’. Watch your sales go up.
13. Remove one feature that you wanted, but your customers didn’t, from your site.
14. Stop reading about marketing stuff and go do it.

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