August 4, 2008 at 7:14 am · Filed under Web_Design
Design And Layout
Before we cover the basics of designing an ecommerce website, let me ask you a simple question: Which do you think is more likely to succeed? A website with a clear, simple and professional design, which is well targeted at the niche market? Or a website with flashy animation, graphics or audio that detracts from its primary purpose - to convert visitors to customers?
Obviously, a clear and professional design is better able to convert online visitors to paying customers. When designing your website, pay attention to the following:
Since the online community is generally impatient, your homepage must be able to capture the visitors’ attention within the first few seconds, or they are likely to lose interest quickly and leave your website. In general, you should aim to capture the visitors’ interest within the first ten seconds of their visit and persuade them to continue browsing your site. Thus, your headlines and sub-headlines should be well written to catch the visitors’ attention and get them to continue reading.
Your salescopy are the words that capture your visitors’ attention and compel them to make purchases. A good balance between salescopy and graphics on your website enables you to present the value of your products effectively. Do not focus solely on either aspect - a good balance of both gives you a sales process with the highest chance of sales.
Navigation must be consistent. Your navigation links must be named clearly, and your navigation menu should be placed consistently on a specific location of your web pages, like horizontally across the top or vertically on the left. As a rule of thumb, your visitor should be able to access any information they’re looking for with a maximum of 3 additional clicks.
The opt-in offer is a web form that you can use to collect the visitors’ email addresses. Apart from getting visitors to buy from you, the secondary purpose of your site should be to collect the visitors’ email addresses, allowing you to send product promotions to them in future. Hence, your opt-in offer must be placed at a prominent spot on your website, e.g. on the top-left corner of your homepage, to yield the highest visitor opt-in rate.
When designing your website, there is one crucial point you need to keep in mind - your website serves as a platform to display your catalogue of products to your customers. The aim of your website is then to convert the visitors of your website into buyers.
Remember to focus on leading the visitor through the sales process step-by-step. Produce clear instructions and directions to tell the visitor what to do, and not leave the visitor to figure out how to make a purchase. This is an extremely important factor influencing the conversion rate of your website.
Images
The images you display on your site should mainly comprise of photographs of your products. Do not include fanciful ‘cartoon’ graphics or animation - these make your site appear unprofessional, and drive your visitors away in a hurry!
With regards to the image file formats, all your photograph files should be in the JPG format. This is the best format to display your pictures with excellent quality and low file size at the same time. Don’t forget - the time it takes for your webpage to load should be capped at a minimum.
On the other hand, images like your business logo and navigation buttons should be in GIF format. These pictures do not require resolution as high as your photographs - and the GIF format offers the lowest size for such files.
Keywords And Search Terms
Your business keywords and search terms are also critical considerations when designing your website. Deciding on your keywords beforehand optimizes your website for the major search engines like Google, Yahoo and MSN. Given below are the steps to take for proper search engine optimization.
Before writing your content and salescopy, first brainstorm a list of keywords related to your business. The Keyword Suggestion Tool from Yahoo! Search Marketing is very useful for producing a list of keywords. The exact number of keywords depends on the range of products you have.
When designing your website, include these keywords in the page titles, meta tags and heading tags. Doing so will definitely improve your search engine rankings for those particular keywords. Additionally, you should also sprinkle your keywords uniformly throughout the page when writing the page content.
Browser Compatibility
Apart from Internet Explorer, the online community also uses other internet browsers like Netscape Navigator. When designing your website, you need to ensure that it is compatible with other internet browsers, or your website will appear with a messy layout. Ensure that visitors using other browsers like Netscape can also view your product catalogue with ease.
Things To Avoid
Overuse of banners, graphics and color. Too many pictures or banners only distract the visitors from their purpose - to browse through your products and make a purchase. To reiterate, your website should have a simple, professional design that serves one purpose only - to get your visitors to buy from you.
Slow loading time. How many times have you left a website during the first few seconds of your visit, simply because you were too impatient to wait for the entire webpage to load? Remember to design your website such that it loads within the first 2-3 seconds for an average broadband user. Minimize the size of your graphics if possible.
Patterned, colorful backgrounds. Do professional websites like Amazon.com or Yahoo.com use patterned or colorful backgrounds? Using a white background is a safe bet in most cases.
Poor spelling and grammar. The text on your website must be grammatically correct with accurate spelling. Nothing diminishes your credibility as quickly as poor spelling and grammar.
In conclusion, you need to pay attention to the design and navigation, the images, the keywords, and also the browser compatibility for your website. Avoid fanciful graphics, slow loading time and inaccurate spelling when designing your website. Remember - the single critical aim of your website is to convert your visitors into paying customers.
Ray Yee is the founder of Dropshipperscentral, a website that provides a wealth of informative articles, guides and resources on everything you’ll need to know about setting up and marketing a Drop Ship Business. Click here for the Drop Ship Directory from http://www.dropshipperscentral.com
Tags: ecommerce, online store, web design, web development, web programming, websiteecommerce, online store, web design, web development, web programming, websiteShare This
July 10, 2008 at 12:07 pm · Filed under Web_Design
Web Design does not necessarily have to be as complicated as it may seem. With a little ingenuity and some creative work a website with a clever web design can take form. To get started one must think about what they like best about other websites. What is it that they have that your website doesn’t have? What is so special about their site that brings in so much traffic?
If you are looking to have a web design that has great graphics and visual effects that will catch a viewers eye then the first step is to find a template that matches your desired web design. A template is the first step to a web design, it is you skeleton if you will. Finding a template that has all that you want plus the graphics that may suit you best is not too difficult. It just requires you to spend some time on the internet searching through the hundreds of companies that offer template services. In one of those companies you are bound to find something that you like. Not to mention that with the use of a template you can have a uniform professional web design.
Once you have the template picked there is that pesky matter of the content on your web page. A reader will not want to read something that makes them feel that they are reading a school textbook. They are going to want something that is entertaining and feels enjoyable to read.
Easy navigation through the web design will aid in the viewers ease through out the website making it user friendly and pleasant. To do this make room for navigation cues that are on the website directly and in a logical place on the page. For example it is best to have the navigation cues at the top or the bottom of the page as opposed to the middle of the page.
Don’t forget about HTML. That code that does wonders for any website that it is put on. HTML can aid in the efficiency of a web design and help to produce a much more attractive web page. It will can also add to the entertainment of the content by adding color, changing size etc.
Putting all of this together may seem a lot at first. However, breaking it down step by step in the web design process will make designing that website easy, fast and more efficient bringing in the desired traffic. With just a little time you web design can be a fun creative endeavor.
Web Design
Tags: custom web design, ecommerce, ocommerce, web hosting, websitecustom web design, ecommerce, ocommerce, web hosting, websiteShare This
June 23, 2008 at 11:01 pm · Filed under Web_Design
If your small business is venturing into ecommerce, you may be daunted by the technical wizardry you think is involved. But fear not: complete web store software packages will keep all the technical wizardry safely behind the screen, so you don’t have to worry about it. All you have to do is choose a design, stock your store, and promote it. Here’s how to do that.
Designing Your Online Store: Choosing a Template
When starting a brand-new online store for a small business, you’re better off choosing a pre-existing design template rather than having a design done from scratch.
- Templates. If you’re not quite sure what kind of design you’d like, you can browse through the design templates included with most hosted online store programs.
- Themes. Some online store builders take the design template concept one step further, with “themes.” Themes are essentially templates that include not only basic design elements but also text styles such as font faces and sizes. Themes also allow for slightly different pages across a website with a single unified design, without having to configure each page individually. For instance, a web store theme might include a product description page, a product category page, an “add to cart” page, and a checkout page. Just by choosing a single theme, you have all the pages in the shopping cart designed with a single, unified professional design, just like big, successful web stores.
- Theme builder. If you want to make changes to a theme-say a different font or a different color-some web store software packages make it easy with a “theme builder.” With the theme builder, you can select values for features such as color and font. You can even choose to build a theme from scratch, though for most web stores this will be a case of re-inventing the wheel unnecessarily. You don’t need to know anything about HTML; the interface is much like a word processing program.
- Professional design. Once you’ve created your store using templates or a theme builder, you can turn to a professional designer to make your site really special. Still, you may want to stick with the basic template or theme-builder site until you have a firm idea of how users are interacting with it and what elements are working. That way you’ll have concrete requests to make of the designer.
Building Your Online Store: Inventory
The foundation of any online store is the products or services being sold. With most web store and shopping cart software packages, the functions for adding, removing, and pricing items are collectively called “inventory.”
Even if you’re selling intangibles such as downloadable software, you will use the inventory functions to specify how the items will be sold. There are options for setting the available quantity in stock to unlimited, or handling just about any kind of permutation of selling products or services online. Web store software makers have seen it all.
One of the great things about using a hosted web store software package is that if you do have trouble setting something up, you can get help quickly from customer service.
Adding New Web Pages to an Online Store
If you want to add new pages to your online store, the store creator software can help. If all you want is to add a new product, you only have to use the “add a product” feature, which is often listed under “inventory.” However, if you want to add pages for sales copy, manuals, privacy policies, terms and conditions, the store creator interface is the way to do it. Most online store creators have a way of adding pages to a web store without having to use HTML; you simply type in your text in the form and upload any images.
Getting Your Store Found in Search Engines
In order for your online store to generate the most business possible, you’ll want to make sure that your store is easily searchable for Internet shoppers. Unfortunately, some web stores create pages using a dynamic script that search engines cannot index.
Often you can tell if a web store cannot be indexed by search engines by looking at the URL of an inside web page (the homepage, also called the index page or “front page,” will usually be search-engine-index-able no matter what). If the URL is a long string of characters that is slightly different from one user to the next (say, when you open the page on your computer and someone else opens the page on another machine), that likely means the site is using “session IDs” which search engines have a notoriously difficult time interpreting. If the URL is something simpler, such as domain.com/category-5/product-6.php, the page is much more likely to be search-engine friendly.
The best way to check whether a web store or shopping cart software produces “search-engine-friendly” pages is to check the documentation; software that’s search-engine-friendly will usually say so.
Of course, as with any website, doing well in search engines still requires your site to have links pointing to it and some text on the pages. Just because search engines can index a page doesn’t mean they’ll return it for any searches.
Joel Walsh is a web business owner and writer. For a hosted web store software package, check out this online store builder: http://www.easystorecreator.com
Tags: ecommerce, ecommerce solutions, online store builder, shopping cart softwareecommerce, ecommerce solutions, online store builder, shopping cart softwareShare This
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