Clarity helps: people need to know what to do. Life’s too short to read the instruction manual on everything we encounter – even if you could find where the instruction manual has been hidden because although one’s been created, no-one ever really reads it.

Websites are no exception to this.

If a website is too confusing, you’re more likely to click the “back” button than you are to spend time working out what to do next.

New websites are especially bad at making themselves clear – the team are so engrossed in their concept and think that everyone will “get” what they’re offering just from a few icons and maybe a 30 second video.

I encountered more than one site like that when I was looking for a podcast platform. The sites maybe told me that I could upload an audio (d’oh!) and after that I was expected to sign up. Often without a hint of pricing or the different offerings.

Facebook and Twitter still do that – if you’re not logged in it’s basically just a signup page –  but both of those are big enough to get away with it.

Would-be competitors use that as their model and think that people are going to put all their personal details on a new site “just because”.

If you care about your sales and profits, that’s not a luxury you can afford.

You need to be much clearer on your website about what you’re offering and what people need to do next.

When he was alive, Gary Halbert took this to the extreme by explaining the whole telephone conversation that would take place when people phoned up to order.

That increased sales because it removed the uncertainty that was in at least some people’s minds.

I’ve not done it but I suspect that showing people the order process – especially with third party credit card processors like Clickbank – would help a lot.

And, yes, I know that technically Clickbank aren’t a third party credit card processor. Mainly because the credit card processor agreements don’t allow that. But it’s what they are in practice even if the letter of the agreement means they’re not.

A bit like the fact that we don’t own most of the software we buy because the terms and conditions we click to say we’ve read state that we’re just getting a licence to use the software.

You could argue that those last few paragraphs are digressing but they do actually relate to clarity or lack of it.

Historically, software has always been sold via a licence system. That goes back to the days when programmers were scarce, programs had to be created with archaic tools – back in the 80’s I knew someone who actually wrote software in machine code. Not something anyone in their right mind would want to do today.

The cost of developing the software meant that it was “sold” with a licence to use it for a certain amount of time and then re-billed for the next amount of time.

Adobe, Microsoft and others are going back to that concept as it means a lower up-front cost for the consumer and a more reliable revenue stream for the supplier.

And it’s a much clearer arrangement than the licence option where people thought they’d bought a copy of Windows XP and Microsoft thought they’d only sold a licence to them to use it until the end of its product life. A lot of banks got caught out on that one – their ATMs used Windows XP and suddenly they needed to pay for extended support or run the risk that a new vulnerability would be found by hackers.

It’s difficult with the English language to write or say things that have only one meaning.

And it’s nowhere near as easy on a website to make sure that people know what you mean.

Most websites aren’t interactive so you have to interpret what people are thinking from the other clues they leave – whether they’re signing up for your email list, watching your videos, listening to your audios, clicking the buy button and going through the checkout process until they complete the order.

Making things as clear and unamiguous as possible helps a lot in that process.

The title of the page is highly important. It’s what people will see when they search for the page.

And I’ve probably not chosen a particularly good title for this page – when I did a search for making yourself clear on your website, Google interpreted that as a search for removing yourself from the internet entirely.

Certainly not what I had in mind when I thought of the title and not my interpretation of what I meant by the title I used.

So this page probably won’t get many hits for that search as it’s one that (for whatever reason) is open to interpretation.

That’s why a lot of internet marketing products suggest that if you’re selling products, your titles include the word “review” or even the command “buy”.

Buy buttons are interesting things as well.

There have been lots of different tests on the wording that should be used to get maximum results.

For Kindle products, Amazon uses “Buy now with 1-Click”. For other products they offer that option plus the option of adding it to your cart if you’re logged in to your account, a different layout if you’re not logged in.

Which means that Amazon treat customers differently according to how they’re using the site – something I’ve found quite regularly with them and something it’s well worth paying attention to if your site offers products directly for sale.

On their non-auction products, Ebay offer the options of “Buy it now” and “Add to basket”.

Which should tell you quite a lot about their intention – they are assuming that you’ll buy more than one item or, at the least, putting that idea in your mind.

The mere presence of an “add to cart” button on those sites is likely to encourage people to buy more items.

And if you sell your own products it would be worth testing whether “add to cart” worked better than “buy now”, even if the cart could only ever hold one item.

I didn’t bookmark the page and I can’t find it at the moment but I remember reading a page that said just adding words along the lines of “Click the buy button to purchase now” helped increase sales.

Because the clarity is increased – people know what is expected of them – their compliance with what you want them to do next is increased.

Clarity is essential when you’re explaining things.

That’s one of the reasons the Wikihow style “10 steps to …..” articles work and regularly show up in the search results.

They often use pictures to help explain things. Whilst it’s rare that a picture is really worth 1,000 words it can certainly help explain things.

Videos can often help as well – I’ve used them on more than one occastion to figure out how to use an app on my Android phone rather than try to out-guess where the developer has hidden the option I’m hoping is included.

Just be careful to use the right method for the things you’re trying to clarify. I’ve watched videos that attempt to explain how to do things in Excel and they would have been an order of magnitude clearer if they’d been a set of written instructions or, even better, a downloadable spreadsheet to accompany the explanation.

Put yourself in the mind of your site visitor and ask whether what’s being explained or sold on your site is as clear as it possibly could be.

You may need to leave a time gap between creating some of your pages and doing this kind of testing. A gap of a day or two means that you’re coming back to the page with reasonably fresh eyes.

If you come back to the page and wonder what was going through your mind when you created it, you need to go back to the drawing board.

But hopefully you’ll just need a few minor tweaks to the wording.

One simple trick to help check whether or not something is as clear as it could be is to read the page out loud.

Not “out loud” in your head.

But really out loud – as though you were reading the page to someone over the phone.

There’s something about the process of physically reading a page that brings out nuances and glitches that you skim over if you don’t go through the process.

If you stumble over something or it’s not clear when you read it in your head, it’s easy to dismiss or ignore it.

If your tongue gets tied when you read something out loud, you can guarantee the same will happen to visitors to your site. The voice in their head that’s there when they are reading the page will get tongue tied and confused. And confusion reduces sales and conversions.

The clearer you can make yourself on your website, the better.

It takes longer to do that than just putting a page on your site and hoping for the best.

But, over time, it gets quicker and easier.

And if there’s anything that’s not clear or that you’d like to add, feel free to use the comments box below.