Basics of Ecommerce Site Design
Internet commerce web site design is a little different than for a personal site. Contrary to popular belief, you don’t need an award winning web site that costs hundreds or thousands of dollars. Winning awards for web design doesn’t make you money. Content does.
For example, Banks and Country Clubs like to use green and gold. Women generally prefer pastels. Younger visitors may like bolder colors and more ‘eye candy’, wilder graphics, animation, 3D, etc. Choose a template for your customers.
If you can’t tell good from bad templates or want to design your own site I’ve found a great site that lays everything out for you at webstyleguide.com
Keep in mind that you want it to be “user-friendly”, meaning a white or light background that has a good contrasting and legible font to make it easily read, simple layout (not too ‘busy’) and clear and intuitive navigation.
I don’t recommend using a ‘splash page’, a Flash page that is supposed to graphically impress the visitor. With ecommerce design, people generally want the content, not the eye candy, and a splash page just gets in their way. Also, search engine spiders won’t read Flash pages or the links, and sometimes even the content, in the page.
Macromedia’s Dreamweaver web design software specializes in cool graphics and animations, but is expensive and generates huge amounts of the underlying HTML code that makes it difficult for search engine spiders to even find your content.
For those who just want to combine web site design and hosting ThirdSphere Hosting has an intuitive web-based site designer that is really rather flexible, plus several other options for web-based site building.
The biggest advantage of ecommerce is you can test everything quickly and easily. Change designs, content, layout, ads, or headlines. You should only test only one thing at a time, but you can usually see results in a few days.
