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Business
Website Design |
Your web site acts as the store front for the products and services you wish to sell online. Your site visitors are, for the most part, window shoppers and browsers. Remember, you want to convert these browsers into buyers.
Design Guidelines
Grammar and Spelling - Design the site to gently
lead the client through the learning and sales process. Your sales
text must be grammatically sound and spelled correctly. Poor spelling
immediately loses credibility points. Provide sufficient text to
tell your visitors what the features of the product are. Better yet,
tell them why they need to buy your product.
Browser Type - Contrary to popular belief (at least at Microsoft) Internet Explorer is not the only web browser. There are at least 100 different web browsers available. The three most commonly used browsers are Internet Explorer, Netscape Navigator and Opera. Since these three browsers represent over 85% of all users, design your site to look good and work properly in these browsers.
Graphics and Photos - Images are a wonderful to assist in the online sale of your products or services. All images used should clearly depict the product or service. Use original photography or scanned images. Studies show that most people will "click away" if a website takes longer than 10 seconds to load. Optimize your images for rapid download. Also, always use the alt HTML tag so that users with devices that have graphic download disabled (such as slow connections or PDAs) know what was supposed to be on the page.
Multimedia - As a webmaster, I don't recommend using multimedia on an ecommerce site designed to sell products. By multimedia I mean flash presentations, video clips and background sound. Only use streaming multimedia and use that only where it's essential. Additionally, the user should have the ability to start and stop all multimedia manually. That way, users with slow connections can ignore it. Make sure to put the same information contained in the multimedia in text format for those who can't or won't use the multimedia. Also, put a link to the download page for any browser plug ins your multi-media requires. Always remember the 10-second rule for site loading when deciding to use multimedia.
Site Navigation - Site navigation should be simple and intuitive. All the questions a consumer might ask should be answered along the way. Where possible, adhere to the "three click rule" - that is, a visitor should be able to access any information regarding your product or service within 3 clicks of any other area of your web site. Make sure to check out whatever navigation method you decide to use in all three of the major web browsers for compatibility.
Frames - Avoid using frames, since they make it difficult to bookmark individual pages on your web site.
Recommended Web Site Pages
As a webmaster who has designed and setup several ecommerce web sites,
I recommend you include all of the following pages on your ecommerce
web site.
Home Page - The home page should contain your company logo and an introduction to your company and your products or services.
About Us or Company Profile Page - This page provides a summary of the business, your commitments and company goals and is crucial to boosting consumer confidence. An online business is no different than a traditional business. Most people like to put a face to the name. When purchasing goods online form a new web site, I always go to the About Us or Company Profile pages to get a "feel" for the company before parting with my hard earned money.
Contact Page - Your customers need to know how to get in touch with you. They need your legal business name (if different from your web site name), physical address, customer service contact information and an email address for comments and questions.
Sales Pages or Catalogue - These pages will contain the basic information about your products. Catalogue pages frequently link to pages containing more detailed information on a specific product or service. Both kinds of pages link to the shopping cart.
Terms of Use or Terms of Service Agreement - This page should be linked to all product pages. Click Here an example of Terms of Use Policy.
Shopping Cart - This contains the payment processing software and a temporary storage area for displaying the products or services the customer has decided to purchase and links to the check out page for actually purchasing them. Click Here for more information on shopping carts.
Thank You Page - Good customer service requires that you thank your customers for purchasing from you. Normally a thank you page can be specified in your payment processing software setup to send your customer to after than complete their purchase.
Privacy Policy Page - "What are you going to do with my information?" is a question asked by many online shoppers. A privacy policy is essential to building consumer trust. Putting together a privacy policy doesn't necessarily require hiring a lawyer. Click Here for more information about developing Privacy statements.
Refund Policy Page - A refund policy must be placed on your web site to avoid all kinds of unnecessary legal problems. This page should also be liked to all sales pages.
Sign Up Page - You want to keep your visitors long enough for them to become customers. Having visitors sign up for a mailing list, a free offer or an e-zine is one way to get permission to send them email.
FAQ's (Frequently asked questions) - Many product questions will be repetitive and you'll want to add their answers to your FAQ page to both promote customer confidence and save your valuable time. Since, an unanswered question may translate into a lost sale, a well constructed FAQ can coax a hesitant customer into purchasing. You can link to the FAQ through the main navigation system as well as after every "buy me" type statement. The FAQ should be accessible within one click of any other area of your web site that is dedicated to selling the products or services.
Testimonials page - Customer testimonials are some of the best promotional copy around. Elicit feedback from your current customers and ask their permission to publish their comments on your site. Testimonials can be implemented on a page of their own, or interspersed between your own statements regarding the product. If you do implement a Testimonials page, make sure that it can be reached with one click from any other page on the site.
Other Site Design Suggestions
Offering excellent customer support is the best way to gain new customers
and keep your existing customers. therefore, you might want to consider
offering the following:
Provide Downloadable Product Information Sheets - Your visitor may just still be comparison shopping. Since I do 85% of all my non-grocery shopping online, I do a lot of comparison shopping on the internet. One method that has gotten me to return to a web site for purchasing has been when they provided valuable information about product or service with contact information downloadable in Word or PDF format. As a result, when I was ready to buy, I went back to where I had gotten good customer service in the form of valuable information.
Provide Pre-Sales Email Support - Offering to answer pre-sales questions should be encouraged and clearly labeled. Just make sure that the emails are responded to in a timely manner. The ideal window is within 24 hours. Longer response time can be an indication of poor online product support. When responding to customer enquiries, be sure your messages are well thought out. Address the question asked thoroughly and offer further support. Keep in mind that poor spelling and grammar can lose sales.
Should You Do It Yourself Or Hire a Professional?
That depends on what either you or your employees skill levels are
and exactly what image you want to portray for your company. Some
of the necessary skills are:
- Some HTML knowledge. Good web design software can help
- Some artistic ability and good taste both of which are necessary for an attractive web site.
- Graphic software expertise is required to produce attractive and clean photos and site graphics, optimized to the smallest possible file size for quick loading.
- Understanding the functionality of website navigation design and implementation.
- Possibly CGI, javascript or database programming to add a "contact us" form or to integrate with an online database.
- Marketing and business experience. An outside company doesn't really understand your business like you do. Make sure you communicate exactly what you need to achieve. A good website design firms understand how to build Web marketing into the site design to make it search engine friendly.
What does outsourcing cost? For a simple five or six page website, expect to pay $750 to $1,500. For a more complex site you may pay $3,000 to $10,000 and up.
If you or one of your employees has the web site design knowledge, you can save a lot of money doing it yourself. Just be sure the web site has the right look and feel to be representative of the image you want to portray for your business. Using good web site templates might be just fine as long as you select them carefully and know how to make changes.
If you already have some level of company or product branding, you might want to hire a professional designer if you want to maintain your existing image unless you have the technical expertise to do it yourself.
As a webmaster, I do not not recommend that you use any system that has online site building software that requires you to host your site with that specific company or that does not save the web pages you create in the HTML file format. These systems lock you in. If you want to change hosting companies, you can't without having to completely rebuild your entire web site. There are too many reasonably priced ecommerce solutions out there to fall into this kind of trap.
Recommended Web Design Company
DPW Enterprises Web
Design and Hosting
The company can either register your domain name or transfer an existing
domain name. The designers at DPW
Enterprises Web Design and Hosting will custom design website
templates for your company based on a hand-drawn block diagram or a
URL of a site you like or one of the sample pages they have. Next,
they will either create your logo from scratch, a pencil drawing or
incorporate your existing logo into your custom template.
After you approve the template and provide them with the page contents, they will do a rough edit and add your content to your website pages, add all the necessary links and upload it to your website for final approval. All of this is done at a very reasonable price.
Their customer support includes telephone and email access. If you want telephone support, these folks have it. They will also host you web site. DPW Enterprises designed this site.
The company even provides inexpensive training materials so you can learn how to maintain your own site. Click here for more information on hosting with DPW Enterprises Web Design and Hosting
Use an All-in-One Solution
I normally don't recommend an all-in-one solution. But, Sitebuildit is
an exception. You will find here everything, absolutely everything,
you need to start your own ecommerce venture including:
- FREE training materials and educational courses
- ebooks on all aspects of ecommerce ebusiness
- Software and tools to assist you in preparing your ebusiness blueprint
- Domain registration and web hosting
- Tools for your Website design and development
- Strategies for getting traffic to your website
- ....and a host of other services....
It's all available from a single source which means that you don't have to worry whether one component will fit into another or not. And the price you pay - well let me know if there is a comparable product available at the same price. I find it un-believingly low priced.
This product allows you to create your own HTML coded pages if you want to and then just upload them. Or , you can use the online tools to do everything without knowing anything about creating web pages.
Even though I created and maintain the web pages and content on this site using Dreamweaver and I sell basic web hosting on another site I have, I used the SiteBuildit system to set up this site because of the comprehensiveness of the tools and services that are included and the low cost. Although my web space would have been free, this system comes with automated tracking and submission tools. Just the time I save that I can spend earning money by not having to do the tracking and submission myself pays for the system.
There will also be a complete ecommerce package available soon. Click Here for more information on this All-in-One web site design and hosting solution.