Thursday, September 30, 2010

5 Simple Ecommerce Web Design Tips

Posted by:  All Web design

Why do people bump on an ecommerce website? The question is simple and so is the answer. Inidividuals often visit an ecommerce web site to shop on the web and that all. That basically means, an ecommerce has to be basic in structure and style and there ought to be no visual gimmick. But internet site designers who are totally aware of this concern, often fall prey to the classic site layout dilemma when they fail to maintain their creative impulse in check and churn out a site that looks truly impressive but eventually turns out to be a maze or some thing of that type to visitors. That guarantees 100% failure as majority of visitors will bounce back when they find the navigation or the design is too complex to find anything at ease. Here in this article, we are going to share some useful ecommerce web design tips that can prove highly effective in increasing the conversion rate of your website.


Make Your Shopping Cart Visible: While purchasing products online, online shoppers always want to have the peace of mind that the items were clearly registered. So, it is imperative for you to place the cart along with the check-out information in a place that can be accessed by the users whenever they want. A readily available and clearly visible checkout data can ease the pains of the users who are in the habit of checking their balance whenever they add something in their shopping cart. It can smoother their journey from shopping to checkout and we believe you will do almost anything to ensure a perfect finish of this transition. Keep the visitors happy and satisfied since it is the bottom-line.


Use Auto Complete Function: This is a powerful tool that can help your visitors to find out their favorite products while they are typing on the search box rather than after typing. It is simple yet extremely useful feature that make it easy to find out what they are looking for. After all, everyone wants to have quick access and this feature can prove to be instrumental in this regard.

If the search query did not anything, this feature can provide the closest matches so that visitors can make a better decision quickly and decisively.


Clarify The Navigation Path: – Unless you have umpteen numbers of categories in your website, clarifying the navigation path can be a nerve-wracking task. Fly out menu is certainly one of those few options that you can have to let your visitors navigate to any page of your website at any time.

But remember one thing, you should not try your artistic skills while designing the Fly out menu of your web design. Try to keep it as simple as possible. Alternatively, you can use breadcrumb navigation for the same purpose. By integrating breadcrumb navigation, you can help your visitors to trace their way back.


Add A Quick Product Review: Online shoppers do not have enough time to visit each product by clicking on them. They wish to have a quick preview option by virtue of which they can check out the details of different products without leaving the current page. This will definitely help them to sort out the best products without wasting much time and effort. A quick preview mode can go a long way to make your products visible and accessible to your targeted audience.



Do Not Make Your Product Page A Dumping Ground: Try to feature only those information that are useful. Do not try to exaggerate anything since it can have detrimental effects on the users’ loyalty and try not to use too many images since it can distract the attention of the visitors to certain extent. Try to maintain a hierarchy. Feature crucial images first and place the rest of the other elements thereafter.

 
Article Source: Web Guru Info System

Sunday, September 26, 2010

Logo Design Tips for Corporations

Posted by: All Web Design

Corporate logo design is not just a part of your corporate jargon, it butters your bread by playing a significant role in building your corporate image in the market. Your corporate logo design needs to convey a comprehensive idea about your company values to the viewers. Your customer identifies you by your logo design, so much so that he or she might identify the product with your brand name, like happened in the case of Sony’s Walkman. So design the logo which is unique and easy to memorize, nonetheless delivers a shot which too is hard to forget!

The actual process of designing it may be achieved in-house or outsourced to professionals. There is now a plethora of logo designing companies that offer excellent logo designing for minimal charges. Some key points to be kept in mind for an effective corporate logo design are:

1. Simplicity: Don’t build into your logo Aristotle’s philosophy on life. Keep it simple and memorable. Companies spend thousands of bucks to make their logos more effective and eye catching, rather than complex and diverting. Remember how when you see SONY, you see perfection.

2. Colors: Colors are not an integral component to logo design but important to brand recognition. Colors express emotions, with each color popularly standing for one emotion or the other. However, use only a few colors instead of using all the colors from the visible spectrum of the rainbow! If you already have your corporate color, use those colors in your corporate logo.

3. Compatibility: Compatibility plays a key role. Compatibility of colors used in the logo and the logo itself with the business stationary used (Cards, letterhead and envelope etc). Also keep in mind that your logo should look good in black and white since your corporate logo design used in all corporate communications (Fax, photocopied document etc.) will be a black and white combination.

4. Promotion: The next step after the design process is to promote your logo. Avail of quality printing services. Print your logo on your business stationary as well as on your products. This will go a long way in popularizing your corporate logo.

5. Don't Use Logo Design Software: Using logo design software will successfully kill your logo even before it’s started! Such softwares offer cheap shortcuts in the form of pre-designed templates and images and allow you to add your company name in the end of the murk. Quite predictably, logos created using such softwares are uncommonly common. So veer away from such cheap means. If you want your logo to be the best, then it deserves services that are the best.

Web Development Tips for Beginners

I thought this would be a great way to kick my new blog off, a great article about web development tips by Tom Higgins.  I hope you enjoy!

By Tom C W Higgins

Creating a website may seem like a daunting task that only geeks can do, this is not true! Anyone including you can easily sit down, do one or two hours research and begin to design and layout a plan for your website. The biggest hurdle is knowing where to start and what kind of things you will need. Obviously you will need a computer! Then you need a piece of software that lets you create your website. The simplest and easiest way to start creating your website is to use a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) website building software. Many can be had for free and this cuts out the need for you to learn HTML. HTML is what all websites are coded in. It is not a huge subject and is certainly worth learning about if you plan on getting in deep with web design and development.

The next most important thing to do is to find a niche topic for your website. It's easy to copy everyone else's websites on plants or whatever, but in order to stand out and attract more visitors you need to come at a topic from an angle that no one else has. Once you have decided on your niche, you need to start designing how your website will look. This is worth some extra research as the design of your website will influence how people behave on it, and if it's designed badly it may just send them right back to from whence they came! Follow popular conventions, like having the navigation down the left hand side, no more than two or three colours for the theme of your site and keep everything on the page evenly spaced.

Now that your site is finished, it's time to choose a domain name! This is where you pick the address that people type in at the top of the browser, like ww.mywebsite.com. Try to find a company that provides domain names and web hosting. Usually it's easier and cheaper if you get your web hosting and domain name from the same company. You won't need to setup something called domain namespace servers either, so it's a good idea to get everything from the same place. Domain names are cheap, usually anything from $2 to $15 depending on the extension (.com.co.uk.me etc) you choose. ".com" often being the most expensive but it is the most recognised extension on the internet, it's also easier to remember a website with that too.

Once you have got your domain name sorted out, it's time to upload it. Before you can do that though, you will need to get web hosting. Web hosting is something that lets you put your website online so people can find it. It is often very cheap, usually in the range of $20 to $40 per year. Once you sign up the web host will send you some emails, and one of them should contain what is called your FTP log-in details. This should be in the form of an address (ww.mywebsite.com or 123.321.123.321), a username and a password. Keep this information safe as it's very important!

The next part is to get your website onto the internet. This is a little more complex than the designing and developing stage of your site. You have to get your hands on a piece of FTP software. There are many free FTP "clients" online that you can download, such as FileZilla. This is what allows you to connect to your web hosting provider's computer (server) and upload your files, just like if you were to copy files from your hard disk to another place (usb drive, cd etc).

Once your website is up and running, you may be wondering why hardly anyone is coming to visit. This brings you onto something called "SEO", which stands for "Search Engine Optimisation". This is a very wide and volatile subject with many techniques and conflicting arguments on how to spread the word about your website, i.e. getting your website to appear on Google, and the higher the better. It is easier to think of your website like a business, and the traditional way people heard about businesses was through word-of-mouth and customer recommendations. Something similar is true with regards to websites. At the most basic level, the more websites that are linking to your website, the more important your website seems to Google. You can think of links as votes, the more links to your site from others, the more votes you have. This subject is vast and complex, and there are many other factors that effect how the linking process works. For instance, a link from a very big and popular site is much better than a link from a tiny site that no one's heard of.

That's it in a nutshell. Remember, you can never do too much research and you don't need to fork out a ton of money to create and run your own website. Watch out for companies offering to get you to "number one on Google" too, as this is a popular line from scammers. A "first page position" is a much more legitimate statement!
Tom C W Higgins Consultant for internet solutions and provider of ftp accounts.