Ecommerce Site Design Tips

Ecommerce Site Design Tips

Following these basic guidelines will help make your site not only attractive, but also easy for customers to use – and that means easy to buy from you.

1. Carefully research your own favorite ecommerce sites. Creatively adapt the most compelling marketing and ecommerce design techniques to enhance your site’s effectiveness.

2. Your home page is your site’s – and your business’ – online front door. It’s essential that it make a good first impression on visitors. Make sure it clearly presents the following basic elements that customers are always likely to look for:

• Your company name, logo, and tagline prominently displayed.Take full advantage of the opportunity to showcase your brand identity.
• Contact information. Don’t make it difficult for visitors to find your phone number, e-mail address, mailing address, and fax number.
• A link to an “About the Company” page for customers to quickly learn who you are and what your business offers.
• A site menu listing the basic subsections of your site. Keep this menu in the same place on every page throughout your site to make it easy to navigate.
• A “What’s New” section for news, announcements, and product promotions. Frequently updating this area will encourage customers to return often.
• Your privacy statement, clearly describing your business’s policy for protecting customer’s personal information.

3. Make it easy for customers to navigate your site. As you build your site, try to minimize the number of clicks it takes the customer to go from your home page to actually being able to make a purchase. Four to six clicks is a useful rule of thumb. Make sure links make sense, so customers know what to click to find what they’re looking for. Don’t make your navigation buttons or links too dominant an element in your site design: instead, focus on product information.

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4. Keep things simple. Don’t fill up your site with graphics, animations, and other visual bells and whistles. Stick to the same basic color palette and fonts your company uses in other communications, like your logo, brochures, and signage. Ensure that images and graphics serve to enhance, not distract from, your marketing goals. Make sure the text is easy to read – black letters on a white ground may not be terribly original, but they are easier on the eyes than orange type on a purple background.

5. Keep download times short. Test pages to make sure they’re not too heavy with graphics that will slow load times – and minimize the size of your images when possible. Zona Research estimates that most Web pages take anywhere from three to eleven seconds to load, depending on the user’s modem and Internet connection (remember: many ecommerce customers shop from home using slower connections). Most users click away to another site or log off if a page takes more than eight seconds to load, costing ecommerce businesses billions in lost potential revenue.

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