Forums: Discussions for entrepreneurs and small business.

Hi All, I just came across this site and am so looking forward to learning and receiving your input.

First let me tell you what we do, we publish a discount coupon book for the Myrtle Beach Area, which is a very popular tourist vacation spot, over 15 million people visit the area a year. We have more restaurants per capita then any place in the Country as well as shopping.

There are a number of coupon books that are available for free which offer very small discounts like a free app, free souviner gift or 10% off where our discounts are on the BOGO free and or half price as well as free admission to nite life and much more.

We are not getting the unique visits per month as the site VisitMyrtleBeach.com which last year had over a million uniques a month some months.

The main concern I have right now is the conversions to sales and keeping folks on the site, running now at 72% are leaving the site in less than 30 seconds.

So I am looking for any copywriting advise as well as site layout.

www.MyrtleBeachPromotions.com

 

Thank you in advance to all who help

 

Gary

 

 

 

 

 

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The first thing I noticed about your site is the heavy use of bold text. It is preferable to use different font types to make the content stand out. Using so much bold text make the page hard to read since I had to slow down to take in what I was reading. Some visitors might find it annoying and leave right away.

You need a search function so visitors can quickly find if a particular restaurant or attraction has a coupon. The idea is to make it as easy as possible for them to find out the required information without wasting time clicking around the site.

A brief description for each coupon will be helpful so a user don’t need to click on each one to find out more information. This way you don’t clutter the user’s desktop and make him/her manually close each page. I am not sure you choose to open a new page when someone clicks on a coupon. This can be annoying to some visitors. In addition, you are making them go away from the main site. You can use bigger fonts when displaying the list of coupon or put them in group of four for example. These changes will make it easier to read and to quickly scan the page. 

Links to the About Us and Contact Us page should be added to the top since it was hard to find them. I will often clicks on the About Us page when I land of a new site. This help me to decide if it worth my time to continue.

I hope these comments will help with visitor stay on your site longer. I think your fundraising effort is a great way to help your community.

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A couple immediate changes would make a better user experience.

 

1.  Remove header image entirely. It takes up too much valuable space.

2.  Place title of the site above the navigation links.

3.  Remove most of the text you have on the from page and focus entirely on educating the user about your offer.  I would eliminate 2/3 of the copy and introduce, and use a quick video to explain what your site is about.  This will help people stay longer.

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