Ecommerce Web Design Blog

Ordering an ozCart website is as easy as it will be for your customers to buy from you. You can buy online. Once you buy, we'll step you through the process.

Five steps online

When it's time to buy, what do you have to do to get your site up and running? Fortunately, the process is a simple and efficient one.

Step 1: Choose your base design

If you choose a web design or ecommerce package from Osc Works, the online ordering wizard will ask you to enter a design template number - which corresponds to either an ecommerce template design or web design template. These templates are your base design - the basic layout of the web site including the column-widths, background colour, font styles and so on.

Step 2: Choose your customisations

From the base design (template) you choose, we will insert your business logo if you have one and customise the images to suit you. You can either supply images for us, or our graphic designers can select them from our stock photo libraries. It really helps us if you tell us some sites you like the look of - this doesn't mean that your site will look the same as them, but it gives the graphic designers a feel for what you like and don't like which helps us give you a result that delights you!

At purchase time, you may have purchased other customisations like a custom logo, colour changes or the insertion of Flash animations. We will incorporate these as well.

The end result is a professional looking site that looks fantastic.

Step 3: Get started and configure your site

Once we hand your site over to you, you can start to get to know your new web business. You can choose your product categories, load in the products you will be using, set up the images that relate to those products, configure the payment methods you wish to accept and decide on how you want to ship or post your products. And of course set your prices!

Aim to make your large product photo file sizes between 60-100kb in JPG or PNG format. You may need to use an image editing program to get them exactly how you like.

This is the time you start creating content as well - your returns policy, editing the content on your 'contact us' page, adding a welcome description if you wish to use one, writing your frequently asked questions/terms and conditions and other policies.

Step 4: Start promoting

We will submit your site to search engines to get you started, but how will you create a long term traffic stream to your site? There are a number of things you can consider that may help you, and many tactics that you could use depending on your industry. These include:

• Thinking about your customers: where do they go online to research products and services? How Internet savvy are they? What would they search for? Where are they located? What income bracket are they in? The more you can put yourself in your customer's shoes at this stage the better. Research keyword traffic figures as this may help you get started.
• If you have come from eBay, you could use your eBay store to generate traffic - sell on eBay and send out a flyer with a discount voucher for a future purchase in your new store for example
• Can you optimise your site for the search engines? ozCart is a search engine friendly shopping cart, but it is still up to you to keep your products and categories up-to-date, and submit your site to directories and search engines, and build links from other sites
• How can you use offline methods to advertise? Is your URL on your product packaging and business cards?
• Think about innovative techniques like using blogs, podcasts, forums, newsgroups and other 'search-engine-optimisation' (SEO) techniques to drive traffic to your website. Osc Works has a full suite of paid SEO services if you require them.

Step 5: Review

It pays to monitor how well you are doing. How many links have you built in Google? What do your web statistics tell you about where your web traffic is coming from? Are your profitable products selling? How much are you spending on marketing? The more you monitor your performance the better you will know what is working and what isn't.

Interested in starting to sell online? Find out more about our ecommerce packages, the shopping cart features available or how to order ozCart.

If you don't want to sell online, but want a website to do almost anything else, then an Information Website is for you. Find out more.

Are you ready to take control of your website? An information based website from Osc Works can really help you.

Traditional websites are a number of individual pages that are written up on web authoring tools like Frontpage and Dreamweaver and published to the website in a format called HTML (Hyper Text Markup Language). This is a structured format that tells a web browser how to display content on the page.

HTML websites can be really easy to set up if you have only a small number of pages - 5 or less for example. But they have a huge number of shortcomings like:

• If you change a link in a menu that appears on every page of your website, you have to open up every page of your website to change that link
• The design of the site cannot be easily changed without major reprogramming. For example, if you wanted all the menus to display on the left hand side of the screen instead of the right, doing that would be a headache
• As the complexity of the site content grows, the more you have to rely on the original programmers and site designers to make changes for you. This could get expensive
• Anyone with access to the files can make changes to them - there is no additional security on who can change what
• It is almost impossible to get interactive content into your site like blogs, forums and search management.
• It can be very hard to keep content up to date and keep track of what pages are and aren't up-to-date.

An information site addresses these problems. An information website can do almost anything for your business from provide information about real estate listings to providing a forum to discuss your products and services, or the market. It comes with a content management system, which is a web-based administration control panel that allows you to edit the content, set the menus, determine where things go and turn things on and off. It allows you to manage users (both administrative and customers), run forums, write blogs, publish directories and much more.

If you are serious about a website that is more than just an electronic business card, then talk to Osc Works about our Web Design Information Websites.