Article:
Small Business Ecommerce Web Design
By Joel Walsh
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: www.easystorecreator.com
eCommerce websites have their own unique character that is designed to lead the visitor to one simple task – make an online purchase. A web designer needs to consider a variety of online selling principles while designing an eCommerce website. In this article we will try to take a look at some of the major design aspects that you must have in an eCommerce website.
Many of you are probably already asking why eCommerce website design is different from any other website design. They all need to be attractive, well organized and use the right colors that fits the website spirit and so on. Your instincts are good. However a close look at some successful eCommerce websites will reveal the conceptual differences that are typical in a successful eCommerce website.
An eCommerce website needs to follow certain selling principles:
Give the user a pleasant experience during his online shopping.
Make certain you provide sufficient information on who owns the website and why they should be trusted.
The website must be easy to use. If it isn’t, the visitor will go to your competitor.
Those principles are not new. We all know those basics from our day to day experiences in the mall, shopping center and every other market place that is waiting for us to open up our wallets. The big challenge for a web designer is how to translate those conventional marketing techniques to the virtual world of the internet. I’m sure you’ve all noticed that in most supermarkets the bread stand is placed at the far end of the building, yet you can smell the fresh bread at the entrance (sometimes they even use a special air duct to carry the smells). That has been done deliberately. Marketers use our sense of smell to draw us through the store where we are exposed to all sorts of tempting goodies as we go to get our loaf of bread.
How do you draw an imaginarily path in a web page? A path designed to lead the visitor to do what you want him to do…make an online purchase. Unlike the supermarket our website has no smell. In a website the distance from one point to the other is pretty much the same, so the exit is always right there. In a website you can try to order the “shelf” in the way you think will best expose the visitor to many of your products, but there is always a chance that he will find a short cut to another page that can also be the way off your site.
As can be see, although putting your products on the web is much easier then renting space and opening a supermarket. However, selling your products on the web can be difficult.
A good eCommerce website design will lead the visitor to the right page in one click or two at the most. Sometime web designers will use techniques that would never be considered for non-eCommerce websites. Everyone has seen at least one sales letter website. On these web pages the only link is to the order form. Sales letters are not the most typical eCommerce website because they usually sell only one product. That allows the web designer the ability to exaggerate the one click principle and make it an advantage. All the facts about the product have been presented to the user is a smart way while every few lines he has the option to click on the order form. If he is not yet convinced he will have the option to continue to read more facts and testimonials about the products. Believe it or not, those sales letter websites are actually selling.
“What about online shops?” Online shops have to deal with more then one product. Of course, the greater number of products increases the complexity of the website. Sophisticated eCommerce websites use a variety of personalization technologies in an effort to determine the best selection of products to offer to the visitor. Personalization technologies are a major part of advanced eCommerce websites. However this topic is beyond the scope of this article. The cleverness of an eCommerce website’s personalization technology has a major influence on its design. The first to use such technology was Amazon.com who decided to push their client’s books to a visitor based on that visitor’s past orders combined with the statistics they had collected on all visitors used to predict what someone looking at a specific book might also be interested in reading. Today the goal is to try to predict what to offer the user on his first visit as well.
An eCommerce web design is also about the layout. One important aspect is where the user’s eyes look first when accessing a web page. Lots of research has been done on this topic. Most research showed that the middle left side area will attract the most attention followed by the center of the page. By using these techniques web designers try to draw the “walking path” for the visitor’s eye, much like what was done at the supermarket. An experienced eCommerce web designer will know how to create designs to meets those demands.
If you are about to open an eCommerce website or you are already own one, make sure you understand the web design principles for online selling. Consider consulting with an experienced website designer preferably someone who has experience with eCommerce websites.
Good luck with your sales.
About the Author:
Warren Baker is an Internet business consultant for WebDesigners123.
WebDesigners123 connects the Freelance Web Designer with Webmasters who need their services.
If you would like to read more of Warren Baker’s writings, visit our Website Design Articles page.
Books and software
eCommerce: Formulation of Strategy
- (Financial Times Prentice Hall) Helps executives understand their e-commerce objectives and define metrics and processes that help every team member stay on track. Drawing on research at more than 40 top e-commerce organizations, this text helps optimize brand, technology, service, market, and development.
Strategies for eCommerce Success
- With electronic commerce growing so rapidly, businesses need to examine critical elements that could influence users' perceptions of business-to-business and business-to-consumer electronic commerce. This book presents a study of key components and concepts of e-commerce, evaluates the critical success factors for global e-commerce, the economics of e-commerce, and the practical issues involved with e-commerce in various applications. Also included are discussions of the impact of e-commerce on small businesses and entrepreneurships in the United States, consequences of information technology for customer loyalty, internal e-mail messaging systems within organizations, and e-commerce comparisons of the United States and the United Kingdom.
