An online store
is a 24 hour active revenue machine, it should accurately
display and describe your products and services in a
professional manner to give you the best opportunity
for each and every sale. Your success depends on this.
Now, don't get the wrong idea, a site design does not
need to be full flash, loads of custom images and special
entry pages, look at Google, they have a nice logo and
a clean understandable landing page. Depending on your
target market, you may only need text to make your sales,
but the text still needs to be clearly layed out and
understandable. It's always best to carefully study
and consider the designer for your website. Make sure
he/she is prepared to show you many examples and ask
many questions about your needs. They should ask for
example sites that you like and work to your budget,
not up-sell you special Flash graphics. If you are working
with an ecommerce website shopping cart then it's advisable
that you keep all design services and software technology
within the one company as it's important for the designer
to know the capabilities of the shopping cart software
they need to work on.
Design layout.
Layout of a website is extremely important to the ease
of navigation for your customers. Their product of choice
should only be within 3 clicks from the home page. Be
sure to to have an easy to use category menu and obvious
product titles with good descriptions directly below.
Always aim to cross sell in your product pages with
thumbnails of related items.
If you are using custom graphics or flash design, make
sure this is kelp to a minimum in a shopping cart and
only serves as a quick impressive display of professionalism
rather than showing off how much money you have. Your
design needs to look professional for one important
reason. If your site looks like it was built yesterday
and could easily be taken down today because you obviously
don't care about the look of your business, then why
would your customers be comfortable in spending money
with you. Trust level is a big reason for customers
parting with their hard earned money.
Remember, you only have one chance to make a first
impression. If a visitor comes to your site and doesn't
like what they see, their gone and there's a good chance
they'll never come back.
James O'Brien
Professional hosted and managedshopping cart software
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