Website Design For Ecommerce: The Three Things You Must Get Right
If you're planning to sell goods or services online, you'll need an . And when you consider that your ecommerce site is your shop front, your showroom, your salesman and your cashier, you'll appreciate how important and difficult it can be to get it right. Essentially, the success of your ecommerce website depends on getting three factors right: design, usability and .
First, let's look at design. You have to get the design of your site right because it influences the first impression your visitor gets of you and your business. Your website should be pleasing and inviting to the eye and create a feeling of confidence. If the visitor is coming to your site for the first time, he needs to be confident that you are a good company to do business with. In other words, you have to assure him he's come to the right place.
In addition, your website should reflect such factors as your brand and mission statement. For example, if you're offering legal services, your site should reflect a conservative tone with subdued colours and a classic layout.
Once your visitor lands on your page, he needs to be able to navigate to wherever his interests lie. Design plays a role in this. But it's essentially a matter of getting the usability of your site right.
When considering usability, you first have to consider the mechanics of your business model. You have to decide what you want your visitor to do and then give him the means to do it in a way that's clear and easily grasped.
This is where navigation and layout come into play. One factor that promotes clear navigation is making sure all links are well labelled. For example, 'Click here for more details on our disposable contact lenses' is much more useful that just 'click here' or 'more information'. And your visitor should always know where he is on your website and be able to easily get back to your home page. This can be achieved through the intelligent use of menus, sitemaps and 'bread crumbs'. Remember if your visitor gets lost on your website, the easiest thing for him to do is to go click away, probably never to return.
The next factor in usability is the nuts and bolts of your ecommerce model. If you're selling online, you'll need such things as a payment processor and an online shopping cart. Here you have a host of commercial offerings to choose from. Or you can go for the open source shopping cart system, Zen Cart, a favourite of developers and shoppers alike.
So now you've got an attractive site with high usability and user friendliness. But the most beautiful and usable site in the world will do you no good unless you get visitors. For that to happen, you have to get right. Your site needs to be optimised so that when searcher enter relevant queries in the search engines, your website will appear high in the results. To achieve this, you need relevant text optimised for the key words and phrases that searchers use. This requires expert keyword research and specialised writing skills to get the text not only readable and informative, but also indexed by the search engines for the right words and phrases.
So if you get these three things right, now you've got your beautiful website optimised for the search engines and ready for the stream of right traffic. Finally, you're ready for ecommerce.
When looking for a firm to handle your ecommerce needs, choose one which can handle all three of the above tasks. With one firm in charge of the whole project, things are likely to go smoothly. If you farm out the project to two or three companies, there'll surely be coordination problems. So look for one firm that has both the artistic skill to design engaging and user-friendly websites as well as the technical skills to handle the SEO requirements that will get you listed high in the search engines.
Website Design and Web Development Team – Kudos Web Design Manchester
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