Small Business Ecommerce Web Design

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

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Why Does Anyone Need A Professional Web Designer

June 5, 2008 at 6:06 pm · Filed under Web_Design

With a plethora of website design and website building tools available today why does anyone need a web designer? In fact, if you shop around, you can build a well presented web site for free. So why pay a web designer? This short article will not try and persuade you to pay a web designer, but show you why you should use a professional web designer.

A good website needs to address multiple challenges:-

• Websites need visitors and in turn it must convert those visitors into customers.
• Websites need to work across multiple browsers.
• Websites need to be accessible to multiple audiences and comply with the accessibility guidelines
• Websites require good layout, design & graphics

To bring it all together takes skill and takes a professional. But above all, websites require good content.

DIY

You can do your web design and build your own website. But then again you can do all the building, gas, electrical, plumbing and maintenance work in your home. Many choose to, many choose not to. Indeed a number of years ago you could do all of the above. But then the gas safety regulatory body - CORGI - stopped DIY gas installation and the dangerous work that went with it. And for as long as I know you have to have used qualified electricians to do work on commercial premises.

Recently, NICEIC - the electrical safety regulatory authority - went further and made it compulsory for you to use qualified electricians on domestic premises. Both of these are to stop dangerous homes and premises being created. And it is because so much DIY is being done and because the tools and materials are so readily available.

The cost of DIY

What’s this got to do with web design and building your own website? DIY websites aren’t going to kill anyone but they are going to kill some businesses. House maintenance done to a DIY level will devalue a house and potentially be very dangerous. Web design done to a DIY level will be the same. It will devalue your potential customer’s value of your business. It could be fatal to your business.

Build your own website if you must to save money. But make sure you are a competent DIYer not a messy one or a bodger. Make sure your website looks professionally built, with excellent layout, design & graphics, is accessible across all major browser platforms and adheres to accessibility requirements.

… but above all, websites require good content.

But this is just one reason for considering the use of a professional web designer. I made the comment earlier that above all a web site needs good content. This is moving beyond the web design where a professional web designer will do an excellent job for you. Putting excellent content on your website really is a job for you - the website owner. Your time and effort should be spent here - generating excellent, worthwhile content for your website. To maximise your time here you should let the professional web designer build your web site while you focus your efforts on creating and maintaining a worthwhile and sustainable source of good content for your website - this is something only you can do.

© Rugged Rhino 2005

Jeremy Curtis runs Rugged Rhino - Small Business Web Design Specialists. He can be contacted at http://www.ruggedrhino.co.uk or 0845 201 1946.

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Small Business Web Design That Will Knock Out The Competition

June 3, 2008 at 9:06 pm · Filed under Web_Design

So you have an excellent product or service. You know how to sell it and increase sales by traditional methods - word-of-mouth & direct mail to name two. Now which of following is you:-

• You know that you should be using the internet to grow your business but you are not sure how. You know that if you don’t your competitors are going to get an upper hand. Or
• You are convinced that the internet is total waste of time as it has already burnt a whole in your budget and wasted a lot of your time. Your internet presence is an embarrassment to your company and detracts rather than adds to the value of your products or services. You want to get rid of it but you know you can’t. You don’t know what to do. Or
• You have a web site that attracts potential customers that you would not otherwise had access to, a good proportion of them become your customers and repeatedly buy from you. You measure results & know how effective your marketing budget is and you are able to confidently spend more on marketing that works.

If the third description fits you - Congratulations. You will Knock Out The Competition With A Web site To Die For! If its one of the first two descriptions that fit then you need to do something about it.

Web site Objectives
Your web site is just one tool in the toolbox of your company that is used to market & sell your product & services. That is, a web site MUST sell. All sales & marketing processes have two simple steps and web sites are no different. For web sites those two steps are:-

• Visitors from your target audience arriving at your web site, i.e. a steady stream of qualified leads.
• Conversion of your visitors into customers - and the web site may only be part of that process.

Miss out either of the above and your web site is ineffective. Everything else revolves around these two objectives. Converting interest into action is the only way you turn a marketing budget into real sales.

Business not Technology
Too often, you will hear web companies preach to you about virtues of each of these areas but as a business owner what you need to know which of these areas should receive your attention and budget to achieve your business objective of getting qualified prospects and converting them into customers. There are no hard and fast rules but one component outweighs all others. And that is content. Good content will have the most effect on both the search engines and you human visitors.

Content is King
Copy writing, is probably the most important item on your web site. It is said that Content is King and it is absolutely true. Why, you have to ask, do so many companies, pay thousands to develop a web site with smart flash animations and graphics and then write the content themselves then? It can only be that they have not grasped the importance of the words on their web site. After all it’s the words that people read, it’s the words that call people to action, it’s the words that sell. The rest helps, but a site with poor words is as bad as a site with no words and that is just unheard of.

There is a plethora of “top ten’s” about building a good web site and there are two themes that run through them all and one of them is that Content is King. Search Engine Optimization Experts may well be able to rewrite parts of your web site to appear attractive to the search engines, appear on the first page of Goggle and get you more visitors. But the resultant text & layout is so unfriendly to the human reader that they are immediately turned off and hit the back button. Content is a double-edged sword because it is used by the search engines to provide search results and the very same content must compel the human visitor in to action.

Let Your Prospects Get To Know You
Earlier I mentioned that two themes run through web site “top ten’s”. The second theme is to develop a long-term relationship with your potential customer. The web is an inherently distrustful medium and you have got to instill confidence into your potential customer that you are a real personable organization worth doing business with. None of this is rocket science but it is so often not done. Some ways of doing it are :-

• Testimonials from previous clients
• Independent Product or Service Reviews
• Awards
• Case studies
• Worthwhile original content

Once the initial confidence is built up you can focus on building a long-term relationship with your new prospect. Again there are many ways to do this where the aim is keep in constant contact with your prospect. Easy and growing in popularity are:

• Regular Electronic Newsletters
• Free Reports
• Free mini-Courses

Once produced they cost nothing to keep sending to your prospects and the technology is in place to allow you to do this with minimal time involvement from yourself.

Foundations
A web site is too often seen as a product, something delivered at a point in time. It is true that there is a point in time when the web site goes live but this is very short-sighted to see it this way. And you can be sure you will never wipe out the competition this way. Beating the competition is a long-term strategy . It takes time and it takes a process that starts way before any discussion about the technology takes place.

Conclusion
You need someone to understand your business, take you through a proven process, talk business not technology and then develop a solution to match. Your business needs to attract the attention of its target market (niche) and then convert them to customers. How do you do that? Be personal, develop a relationship, show them you are real and can be trusted and are worth getting to know. Time is precious and your audience is thinking “Are you worth giving up my time for?”.

Once done, its just a matter of time before they buy. If they are the right audience then time is the only variable.

So the word web site is insufficient. The phrase Internet Marketing Solution is much better. Don’t buy a web site it will cost you. Invest in an Internet Marketing Solution it will reward you. After all, that is your objective to market your product & services on the internet. And you want a solution that provides everything - the core web site design & development, good graphics, copy writing, search engine optimisation, pay-per-click, and Email marketing.

© Rugged Rhino 2005

Jeremy Curtis runs Rugged Rhino - Small Business Web Design Specialists. He can be contacted at http://www.ruggedrhino.co.uk or 0845 201 1946.

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