Ecommerce Web Design Blog

When creating a web design for yourself or briefing your web design professional on the site you would like to have, it is very tempting to request to include swishy coloured boxes, an old logo that your brother designed in WordArt 3 years ago that you've used on all your promotional material since and your favourite pictures, colours and images. Unless you are an exact match for the types of customers you are targeting, you may need to think twice about this strategy. You may love it but your customers may not.

Creating an inviting web experience is absolutely critical in showcasing your business or selling online. An easy-to-use, secure and fully functional shopping cart will only get you part of the way. To get your customers over the line and buying from you, you also need to create the most professional and appealing buying environment you can. 

This means you need to put yourself in your customers shoes every time you create a design. It's very similar to designing a storefront that is inviting and makes your customers walk through the door. Always ask yourself:

• What do my customers expect to see?
• What would my customers consider inviting?
• Does my design look as professional as possible?
• Are my product and header images clear and crisp?
  
• Just like in interior design you need to think about the colours used. Ask does my colour palette work well together?
  
• Is my web design too cluttered?
  
• Is my web design too bland?
• Would your most fussy and frustrating customer find your site appealing and buy from you?
  

If you are unsure, let your web designers guide you. After all, it's their job to understand your customers and make your site look as appealing as possible. But they can only work with what you give them and within your instructions.

When you are creating a new website, which is more important: a beautiful design or many powerful features? The answer to this question is that both are important and getting the balance right can make the difference between a successful and unsuccessful online shopping website.

Finding balance is important, as you will probably have seen many sites that are either too far in one direction of the other: sites either overloaded with flashy graphics or cluttered with hard-to-read or confusing content.

Go too far in either direction and the result can be a disaster for your online shop. Beautiful eye candy and animations may look fantastic to you in printouts when you are building your website, but can lead to extremely slow load times. Cluttered text can seem unprofessional or overpowering text can bore your customers and put them off buying from you.

If your website's purpose is to sell products, what is the point in making your buyer wait five minutes while your page's intricately designed flash animations on your home page load? Will your customers appreciate seeing the same animation load over and over on every page they look at in your cart? You want a cart that fits with the brand values and the look and feel of your business, but one that also has features to make it easy for your customers to buy from you, and easy for you to manage.

ozCart ecommerce websites are designed to balance form and function by providing you with a number of professionally designed base layouts which we then customise the graphics and colours in them for free. Functions like a progress bar in checkout, wishlists, easy-to-use carts and being hosted on ecommerce-optimised servers, make for an online shop that is friendly and inviting.

Behind the scenes our ozCart shopping carts are also packed with a number of powerful features . Like the ability to set stock levels for individual variations of your products (eg. blue t shirts and red t shirts can have different stock levels), having your own affiliates promoting your website in return for sales commissions, batch order management, advertising banner management, dropshippers management, bulk product management and built-in gift vouchers to name just a few. All managed by you from a secure web-based control panel. 

You can use as few or as many of the features as you need, so your store can grow with your business. Or purchase add-ons from our ecommerce add-ons  store.

We design our ozCart ecommerce websites to suit your business and balance stylish designs with powerful features. Whether you buy ozCart or some other online shop software, make sure that your shopping cart website has the right balance of features and design for you.

Choosing an appropriate colour scheme for your website is a crucial part of personalising the site for your business. Even more importantly, an appropriate colour scheme can help you attract customers, keep them on your website longer, and buy more products and services from you.

How do you go about choosing the colours for your website? The place to start is to put yourself in the minds of your target customers. If you were them what colours would project the image about your business that would help you read the product descriptions, have positive feelings about the business and buy? The colour schemes that appeal to your customers may not be the same ones that appeal to you, so putting yourself in your customers shoes is crucial.

Some things to think about in choosing colours are:

• Colours that are too close together in terms of brightness can cause acolours problem for your customers when they print out your webpages, as colours of similar brightness may appear the same shade of grey when printed in black and white.
• Many research studies show that dark text on a light background is significantly easier to read on a screen than light text on a dark background. If you are going to select a dark coloured background it's generally better to still display your products on a white background even if the main background colour is different.
• Some people are colour blind, with difficulty in distinguishing green being the most common colour challenge. Since web colours are made up of a combination of red, green and blue, this difficulty in distinguishing green can make it difficult for people to distinguish similar colours like yellow, and orange. Keep similar colours to a minimum in your site.
• Your site is for your customers, not you. Keep it easy to read and you're giving your customers the most chance of buying from you.

 

Recent international research into the behaviour of older users when using web pages reveals some interesting insights to take into account when designing a website.

While children today have grown up with computers, many people over 60 have learned to use computers and the web from scratch. This means that seniors have a different frame of reference to compare the Internet to. Their expectations of what is possible and how it will behave are often different from people in younger generations, which poses some interesting challenges for web designers. How do you build a compelling and meaningful site that appeals to both generations? Part of the answers lie in understanding how seniors use the Internet, as identified in recent research studies conducted overseas.

Those insights are:

• Older people often do not scroll down a page. If they can't find the information they want 'above-the-fold', they will return to the search engine they were using or go to a different website. If you are designing a website for seniors and have content that is likely to scroll the screen, it could pay to actually include 'scroll down' buttons or some indicator that there is more information. Using small snippets of information with 'read more' links could also help you.
• Older users often assume that any key part of a web page (e.g. headings) can be clicked as links. Linking more parts of the screen to pages can help you keep the attention of older customers.
• Older users tend to prefer sites that change the colour of visited links, whereas younger users often have little or no preference for this behaviour
• Fonts that are less 12 points are difficult to read and can deter older users from staying on the website (and buying products). What's more older users often have their computers set to lower resolutions than younger users
• Internet-based phrases are not always well understood by older users. This has implications for developing manuals and providing support. It also suggests that older users are more likely to take advantage of things like glossaries or use search-functionality rather than browse through the structure of a website.
• Simple and clear language can help with readability and retain attention (this applies to all websites, not just those for seniors however).

When designing a site to take seniors into account, think also about the colours you use. Keep them simple, clear and take into account potential colour blindness or other eye issues.

Even if you are not selling your products online, you may not be aware of how easy it is to set up a website to promote your business - and the benefits it can bring.

If customers are looking for a service, even one they wish to buy in the offline world, more than ever they are turning to the Internet to do their homework first. Internet usage in Australia is soaring. The latest figures from Internet World Stats report over 15 million Internet users in Australia, which represents 75% of Australia's population. That's a growth of 135% in the last seven years. New Zealand's growth rate during this period has been even higher with a rate of 285% reported. Some of Australia's most successful businesses exist only online with no physical stores.

There has been some stagnation reported in online growth because big retailers have been reluctant to come online. But this hasn't prevented customers from attempting to window shop online. Price comparison sites, tourism sites, car searches and accommodation all heavily rely on the Internet.

If you're a small business looking to complement your physical store, a charity wanting to get your message out there, or just want to promote your business, how can you take advantage of a website? Here are some ideas:

• Develop content for your site that other people will find useful and then link to. This will build your profile in search engines and hence traffic. Once traffic figures are high enough you will be able to sell advertising space.
• Use third-party affiliate banners in your site - when people click through from your banners and buy, you receive a commission
• Add Google Adsense to your site - so you display advertising on your site via Google and receive commissions for clicks
• Encourage people to subscribe to read your content - this is the online version of how magazines make money.

Setting up a content-based site is limited only by the amount of time you have to write the content. The content management system provided in our Osc Works Web Design Packages helps you keep track of pages and creates menus that manage the link structure for you. There are also specialist packages available if you want to build any of the following:

• Web Directory
• Real Estate Website
• Forum
• Blog
• Photo Gallery
• Bookings/Accommodation site
• Car sales or motorbike sales site

For any of the above, just ask us for more information and a price, based on your situation.

How do you go about writing easy-to-read content for your website?

How do you go about writing easy-to-read content for your website? How can you keep your visitors coming back? Here are some tips that could help you.

1. Write for the customer, not for you

You're passionate about telling everything about your product. But your customers might find knowing everything a bit overwhelming. Put yourself in your customer's shoes: what are the main benefits of your product.

2. Assume your customer's don't have much time

Get to the point. It will be well received by your customers. Keep it short, simple and focussed on the benefits. This will increase your chances of holding your customer's attention and keeping them on your site. Don't try to put your existing brochure online.

3. Be interactive

Take advantage of features like forums and directories to involve your customers. Include forms on your site. Encourage customers to provide you with feedback and information about their preferences, and gain their permission to send them newsletters. You can use newsletters to get them to come back to your site.

4. Keep your content current

if you are regularly update pages, search engines will keep coming back and indexing your site. Your customers will also keep coming back if there is a lot of valuable content. So if you are running a parenting resource for example, keep adding new articles. If you are running a forum about motor racing, comment on the latest motor racing trends, cars, techniques and meets.

5. Create a community

Develop a club with exclusive benefits or something similar to build loyalty. Give them access to special features or content. Give away something special for the people who keep coming back. If you have a forum, reward those who post often. Email your members with valuable information, teasers etc. If you are running a mortgage broking site, have a daily email with interest rates and comments when the Reserve Bank changes the Official Cash Rate is updated. Have a column written by an expert relevant to your industry in your blog or newsletter (e.g. child psychologist, lawyer, chef, economist etc) as this will add credibility to your site.

6. Measure your reading ease

Above all else, keep your writing style simple and easy to read. Use short sentences if you can. Search for 'Reading Ease tools' in Google. Visit one of those sites that measure the readability of your site. These sites give you a score out of 100 about how easy your content is to read. 100 is extremely easy, 65 is plain english, 30 is difficult with long sentences. 0 is extremely difficult language that is very hard to read. Most guides on reading ease say to aim your site 60.

This article has a Flesch Reading Ease score of 65.