On Design and Usability: How to Build an Impressive Online Store

Web designers are always caught in between creating a magnificently sophisticated website and making it work as the design should be. Design wise, a website can be impressive. On another hand, a website, specifically an ecommerce website should be of standard quality and usability in order to not only impress visitors with its design but as well as generating a smooth online shopping experience.

On the next articles of this blog,  I will be writing on how you can effectively design an online shopping cart and assure revenue.

 

How to Make an Online Store that Impress

The new trend of doing business ventures nowadays is through online marketing. Putting up one would need a lot of effort and must be thought wisely. A good marketing and design plan must be done. It must be organized and managed properly for it to be effective and meet the company’s goal and getting an online shopping cart. This could be quite a challenge for you but this is where your marketing strategy and creativity comes in.

One of the website’s objectives would be to attract customers and influence them to purchase your product or service. Catching every customer’s attention by creating a good first impression should be dealt with according to this 3 second test.

Could the customers tell what you are selling to them?

Would the customers trust their credit card and personal information to you?

You can easily address these issues by following these simple tips below.

 Overall clean and simple design

In creating your online store’s website design, you should always bear in mind that you can be artistic and all but it must be clean and simple. Overdoing it would sometimes cause confusion and criticism from your customer which could lead them to navigate away from your page. Colors can play an important role in creating a good impression to the clients. But colors must be suitable according to what your company is selling and must be used appropriately.

Beautiful and relevant name and logo

The place where you must put your company name and logo is called the website header. Having one on your online store’s website can create a great impact on your website’s quality. Having a company name that is relevant or related to what the company is selling would be advantageous. Because this only shows that you are clearly showcasing what you are selling to them.

Clean and simple navigation menu

When customers arrive at your site, the first they want to know is where they would start.  Having a navigation menu displayed to where it is so obvious will be of good help for your clients. Regarding with its design, as always, be creative and make it clean and simple. The menu’s theme must match the overall theme of your website.

 

 

How to Build Your Online Store: Tips to Enhance your Ecommerce Website Speed

Website download speed is important to consider as you create your own website for ecommerce because it is a contributing factor to making a good shopping cart software experience for your customers. Your design and layout may be top-notch and very creative, but when it gets across usability and inability of users to shop online smoothly, then that website design will be the very reason why users will skip the website and move to another.

To ensure usability over design, here are some tips that you need to consider as you create an ecommerce website that works:

Clean out CSS

Design your website using CSS. CSS designed websites have cleaner HTML pages instead of using tables as they are shorter, simpler, and easier to load. Removing unnecessary white spaces also helps out in keeping your website smaller and easier to download. The longer your HTML code, the larger the file your website has which makes it slower to download.

Optimize Images and Image Formats

Images surely take a huge part in the website’s speed, but, images give life to your website, without it, your website will be a bore. In order to add websites but in the same way not use too much bandwidth, you can optimize your images by making GIF images into PNG but with more colors. Also, avoid altering image sizes in codes as this will only add up to slower download speed. Edit the image sizes using photo editing tools like PhotoShop before uploading it to your website.

 

How to Build an Online Store: 5 Ways to Make Online Shoppers Happy in Handing Over Information

1.     Design to Impress in 3 Seconds or Less

It only takes three seconds to impress your online shoppers. Spending all the time, money, and effort to get a good rank in search engines to get targeted visitors is not at all the only thing that makes your website sell. Unfortunately, not all that ranks in search engines are able to convert the visitors it gets. To create your own website for online business, you need to be sure that your website sets a very clear impression for visitors that within three seconds, your website captures their attention and making them identify your niche. To make a good impression, you need to look at the following elements that make up an impression:

• Website Speed

Wherever the online shopper comes from (search engine, direct, or referral site), it is important that your website loads just below four seconds to make a good impression. Websites that load too slow turns-off consumers using high speed internet connection but are in a hurry to purchase products and services. This could prompt hard-earned visitors to go to other websites that provide better speed. How can you make sure that your website loads fast?

–          Choose the right image format and optimize your images.

–          Clean out your CSS and remove white spaces.

–          Reduce HTTP Requests

• Use Colors Appropriate for your Online Store Products

Color psychology has been an important factor in business as different colors suggest different emotions to people. Some colors represent luxury, excitement, and sophistication. Some colors suggest appetite, fun, and simplicity. Creating an online store still holds the same truth. If colors are used appropriately, it can market and sell commodities.

• Make Use of Graphic Design

Graphic design is an art that is used to impart a message. Even the use of typography is a graphic design. To make a good first impression, make sure that you are able to apply graphic designs in the website that it will promote a good rapport between your website and your customers.

 2.      Visible contact information

Any online store is a strange place for consumers. If your website has not established a good impression, it is almost impossible to make a successful website transaction. Having your contact information stick out obviously in the pages of your website will enhance trust and uphold your site’s credibility. All the necessary contact details should be placed wherever it is most visible. Most of the ecommerce websites add the contact details in the top right part of the website. This will prompt your online shoppers that you can be reached through call, email, fax, or to your exact office address any time or within store hours.

 3.       Website pages are easily accessible

To make online shoppers comfortable, you need to make sure that your website navigation menu buttons or links are properly working. This adds to the trust they give to your website. When they are able to navigate smoothly through your website’s product pages, it will not be too hard then to ask for payment details as they checkout.

 4.       Keeping the forms short

Keep forms or profile forms as simple and as short as possible. Remember that the visit might be the online shopper’s first attempt in purchasing products online. Asking too many personal details in one form is not only boring but as well as hinting online shoppers a doubt as to why you need too many details about them when they only want to buy a book or a shirt. Keep checkout forms in a single page and you’ll be happy to realize that most of your customers have happily checked out.

 5.       Shoppers can checkout as Guests

When online shoppers can checkout as guests, they will be too happy to provide their credit card or PayPal information because it is easier to fill out than forms. It also assures them that they are not going to get subscriptions or emails that they have not subscribed. Your online shopping cart software should be customized in a way where visitors need not register to be able to purchase.

 

Quick Guide to Publishing your First Ecommerce Website

Quick Guide to Publishing your First Ecommerce Website

Small and micro businesses don’t necessarily have a budget meant to create ecommerce website that is top rank and fancy. Usually, ecommerce website setup gets a very low fraction of the entire business budget and as well as not given a high priority. If you feel like you are this kind of entrepreneur, here is a quick guide to setting up and publishing your first ecommerce website.

1. Register a Domain Name

A domain name is your permanent internet address. Your online visitors use your domain name to locate you in the web. Get your own domain names using your company name, the brand that you serve, or some keywords that are relevant to your products and services for as low as 10USD a year. Once you are done purchasing your domain name, get a web hosting plan to make your website visible across the worldwide web.

1. Synch your Web Hosting and Domain Name

A regular web hosting plan should be more or less than 3USD per month. Get the name servers of your web hosting plan and synch it to your domain name. Usually, it takes five minutes to 24 hours to let spiders crawl into your website and fully use it.

1. Use your preferred CMS

If you are a newbie at web design, it is very much suggested to use online website builders which usually are a drag and drop tool to help you create a successful ecommerce website in minutes. If you have previous knowledge on how to run a blog via WordPress or Blogger, you can also setup these platforms using your cPanel.

1. Fill your Website with Rich Content

Content is King. If you do not have the time to design or write numerous numbers of pages for your website, consider using a one-page website to serve as an information delivery system. You can always provide a quick product and services guide, company info, and most of all, your company contact details. Make your content as brief but as engaging to allow persons to respond to your message.

1. Provide a Prompt Response

A quick and prompt response to just about any type and kind of inquiry will leave a very good impression to your customers. Always remember the golden rule: Treat others the way you wanted to be treated yourself. If you are knowledgeable, honest, polite, courteous, and timely in your responses, customers will appreciate that and offer free advertising by word of mouth.

1. Social Media

Inform your friends, families, and acquaintances about your new website and the products and services it contain through the use of social media sites like Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Del.icio.us, and the like. Ask them to review your website and encourage them to add comments, report glitches, and send suggestions. In this way, you will be able to know how people respond to your online presence. The more criticisms you receive, the more chances you get to become a better online entrepreneur.

 

Learn How to Build your Own Online Store

Learn How to Build your Own Online Store

To build ecommerce website today has become fast and easy. This is because of the emerging and evolving blogging and CMS platforms that cater all types of web masters and owners worldwide. Some CMS and Blog platforms are easy to build as they come in a drag and drop technology. Some websites are a bit harder as you need to customize the designs using HTML and CSS codes.  If you are interested to build your own online store today, take these easy steps below:

1. Get a Good Domain Name – domain names are those names you see in the URL bar. Domain name prices range from $1.99 to $9.99 per year for regular domain names. There are also different domain name extensions. .COMs and .NETs are websites built for commercial purposes. .ORGs is for websites built for organizations, churches, clubs and the like. .INFOs are websites built to give information about a company or just any type of information.
2. Get a Good Web Host – web hosting packages and plans are very varied. You do not need to get 10GB Disk Space and a 50GB bandwidth for a blog or an online store. 2GB disk space and a 10GB Bandwidth should be enough for an online store. A starter web hosting package should not be more than $30 a year. Check for downtime issues, free website builders, easy download and installation of CMS like WordPress or Joomla.
3. Create Your Products Page – add your products in the products page. Good product images, good product descriptions, and as well as convenient payment and shipping terms add to the success of your online store sales. Learn how to use online shopping carts and how to implement them in your website.
4. Contact Information – Your users need to know where they can get in touch with you. Place your contact details in your home page and as well as create a separate page for your users to place feedback, comments, queries, and tickets. Do not forget to include your physical store address, email, mobile or store phone number, fax, or 1-800 number.

Are you now ready to make profit? Build website online now!

 

The Worldwide Web

The World Wide Web is not called as such for nothing.  The World Wide Web or the WWW is a system that connects all hypertext documents by means of hyperlinks and URLs that can be accessed using the Internet. Like a web, it has nodes that connect one document to another, then another, then another, and another.  Using the Internet via a Web browser (e.g. Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox, Google Chrome), one can view the pages that may contain texts, graphics, videos, or PDFs using hyperlinks or URLs.

To keep things organized, search engines are designed and developed.  Search Engines work to bind all pages existing in the World Wide Web and by means of “crawling” it gathers and reaches the pages being stored once a query is placed.

 

How do search engines work?

First, a process called “crawling” or “spidering” where search engine robots browse the information stored in the World Wide Web in a very orderly manner. Second, a process known as “indexing” collects and stores the data being gathered by the bots in order to facilitate quick and precise data retrieval. Third, here comes the “web search query” which involves a query placed by any user around the globe in a search engine that results to satisfy the information needed. In order to satisfy the user with the results from search query being placed, it will gather billions of indexed pages which hope to

1) Give significant and relevant results based on the submitted query; and

2) To rank the page results according to their degree of importance and value.

 

 

How do search engines qualify “relevant” and “important” web pages?

Once a query is entered into the search engine search bar, the engine automatically “crawls” into the pages being stored, goes through all the pages being indexed, and searches through the titles and parts of the text and gives out the best and most relevant results in the search page. But search engines do not just stop there. It quantifies the popularity of such web pages and ranks them according to authority and other ranking factors which will soon be discussed in the next chapters of this guide.  Page authority means, but is not limited to, having other sites link to your site.

Although the Search Engines have the same goal of providing significant results to the query placed by their users, they have different algorithms used in order to supply the most relevant and significant result.

Why is this important for the internet marketers?

The answer is plain simple – Internet marketers need to develop websites that should be recognized by the search engines as “relevant” and “significant” to the internet community. The most relevant and significant results will land on the first page of the hundreds to millions of pages crawled by the “spiders”.  The websites placed on the first page will most likely get the most visits, which will then turn into leads, then sales, and profit.

Basic SEO Guides to Get Recognized by the Search Engines

Bing

Achieve the most optimum ranking from Bing by following these three simple guidelines:

• Developing a well-researched content using the right keywords for the intended audience.
• Building website pages using well-generated codes, good sitemap structure, and images with alt+texts.
• Get high quality inbound links.

Yahoo!

To successfully rank in the Yahoo! Search engine, here are the basic SEO principles that they are suggesting:

• Providing original, relevant, and high-quality content is a must.  Providing a well-written content could encourage other websites to link to yours.
• Place keywords within your content that are most likely used by searchers in their queries.
• Strategically embed the keywords in the right places of your content such as your website code, title, headings, metadata, links, and the like.
• Use helpful Keyword Research Tools as you create your own website so you will be able to provide a page-specific content using high quality keywords.
• Never use keywords that are not related to your website niche just to lure people to visit your website.
• Link to related websites and encourage them to link to yours.

 

 

Google

Google recommends that Internet marketers use these basic guidelines to be recognized by the Google search engine:

• Only write content and use keywords that represent your website. Never use keywords in your content that is irrelevant and insignificant to your content just to lure your audience into visiting your website.
• Your website should have a well-structured sitemap so Google bots will be able to index your pages properly. A page in your website should be reachable from at least one static link.
• Generate content that is largely loaded with information relevant to the users.  Always take note to create content not for the search engines, but for your audience.
• Use ALT tags appropriately.

In a Nutshell . . .

• Search Engines crawl into the information available in the web, index the information gathered, and provide results to queries being entered by its users by crawling through the information stored or indexed in their database.
• Search Engines’ primary functions are to provide the users the most relevant and significant results based on the query entered by the users, and rank them according to their value. The top results mean the most relevant according to the degree of importance and significance in association with the search query.
• Search Engines such as Bing, Yahoo!, and Google suggests to use appropriate keywords related to the whole content of the website, build the structure of the sitemap and the codes so it can be navigated by the crawlers, write a very relevant and informational content to encourage other websites to link to yours, and get high quality inbound links.

 

SEOptimization and SEMarketing Benefits

In the previous chapter of this guide, we discussed about how the Search Engines work and how do they crawl, index, and send out the given results to the queries entered by the users.  Search Engines function to only give the most relevant results that are of high-quality value of traffic and authority among other things.

The question is…

Being a web entrepreneur, why should we be interested with how search engines work?

The answer is obvious—YOU WANT TO INVITE TRAFFIC!  Traffic can convert into LEADS, and Leads can convert to $ALES which means—REVENUE.

So how will be able to ensure such a tremendous amount of traffic so you can convert traffic into sales?

Search Engine Optimization is a process which seeks to improve your online visibility in search engines by organic search results. Search Engine Marketing, on the other hand, is a target paid listing which is placed on top of the organic search results.  Most commonly, those that are placed in higher positions of the list get most of the visitors.

 

Benefits of SEOptimization and SEMarketing

• Both will receive a high-quality and high-quantity of traffic.
• Gets better rankings in Search Engine Results Page.
• Gets increasing click-through rates which results to an increasing conversion rate.

 

Creating Accurate Meta Data

Creating an accurate metadata not only improves your website’s ability to get crawled by the search engines, but also, it allows users to get an excerpt of what kind of information they will expect on your site.  Having a good Meta title and Meta description facilitates a better understanding of what your website is all about.  Always remember to create a website not for search engines but for your audience.

Here’s how to create your title and description:

Website Name: DK’s Online Pet Store

URL: dkonlinepetstore.com

Description:  Online Pet Store, pet accessories, pet supplies, and pet food

To create a user-friendly and search engine-friendly Title, you must consider the following points:

• Title must be an accurate data to represent your website content.
• The Title must be 60 words, max.
• Should contain your keywords, not necessarily your company name
• Place your company name or brand name by the end of your keywords to be able to increase brand awareness
• You must create the title in between <head> tag which is under the<html> tag.  The Title tag is in this form <title></title>, and the Title of your website should be placed in between <title></title> tags.
• Different pages of the website should have their own Title so it will be able to help Google and other search engines find the uniqueness of each of the pages of your website.

For example:

<html> <head>   <title>Online Pet Store Utah, buy pet accessories, pet supplies, and pet food | DK’s Online Pet Store</title> <meta name=”description=” content=”DK’s Online Pet store offers pet accessories, pet supplies, branded and generic pet food for a cheap price. Wholesale prices are available for large volume orders.”> </head> <body></body> </html>

Things to avoid when creating a Title:

• Don’t stuff your Title with unneeded keywords.
• Don’t create a very lengthy Title.
• Don’t repeat keywords within the Title tag

To create a Meta Description, here are some points to take note of:

• Write a brief but concise description of your website or page content.
• The description provides an avenue for you to advertise your website products and services, so you must be very creative to write it in a way where potential leads will be encouraged to visit.
• Always remember that whenever your page appears in SERPs, this will be read by your target audiences just below your Title and will contribute to the quantity of your click-through rate.

<html> <head>   <title>Online Pet Store Utah, buy pet accessories, pet supplies, and pet food | DK’s Online Pet Store</title> <meta name=”description=” content=”DK’s Online Pet store offers pet accessories, pet supplies, branded and generic pet food for a cheap price. Wholesale prices are available for large volume orders.”> </head> <body></body> </html>

See the example below:

Things to avoid when creating a Description:

• Stuffing the description with repeated keywords.
• Writing a very long description. A description must be at most two sentences long, not over 150 characters.
• Copying all the website page content and pasting it into the description tag.