If you’re planning to sell goods or services online, you’ll need an ecommerce website. As this will be your shopfront, your showroom, your salesman and your cashier, you’ll appreciate how important it is. Essentially, the success of you ecommerce website depends on getting three factors right – design, usability and search engine optimization.
First, let’s look at design. Design is important as it influences the impression your visitor gets of you and your business. Your website should be attractive and solidly professional. This assures the first time visitor that you are the right company to do business with. In addition, your website should reflect your brand and mission statement.
Next there’s the matter of usability. This determines how easily your visitor can navigate your site. The first thing you have to consider is the mechanics of your business model. You have to decide what you want your visitor to do and then give him clear means to do it.
One factor that promotes clear navigation is making sure all links are well labelled. For example, ‘Click here for more details on our refrigerators’ is much more useful that just ‘click here’ or ‘more information’. And your visitor should always know his location and how to return to your home page. Remember if your visitor gets lost on your website, he’ll just click away, probably never to return.
The next factor in usability is the mechanics of your ecommerce model. If you’re selling online, you’ll need a payment processor and an online shopping cart. Here you have a host of commercial offerings to choose from. Or you can go for the open source shopping cart system, Zen Cart, a favourite of developers and shoppers alike.
Ultimately, your beautiful and usable site will do you no good unless you get visitors. For this, you have to get search engine optimization right. Your site needs to be optimized so that when searchers enter relevant queries in the search engines, your website appears high in the results. For this you need relevant text optimised for the keywords that searchers use. Achieving this requires expert keyword research and specialized writing skills. Your text must be not only readable and informative, but also indexed by the search engines for the right words and phrases.
When looking for a firm to handle your ecommerce needs, choose one which can handle the whole project. Otherwise, there’ll surely be coordination problems. So look for one firm that has both the artistic skill to design engaging and user-friendly website as well as the technical skills to handle the SEO requirements that will get you listed high in the search engines.
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The online world has become a fiercely competitive field for emerging businesses and established ones alike. It is not just about keeping a loyal customer base and getting repeat traffic anymore. It is about snatching customers from competition, ensuring new traffic everyday and achieving higher sales each month. About 15 years ago, there were hardly any ecommerce websites around, and the ones that existed were simple online stores. Circa today and ecommerce is all the rage online. And with competition comes the need for new strategies to fetch the desired sales. Videos can be an effective strategy in ecommerce website design to fetch more customers and hence more sales.
Here are some reasons why videos are an important part of ecommerce website design:
More search traffic
Any online business needs search visibility to survive, something which is determined by search engine optimization. And of late, search engines like Google are giving more importance to videos than plain text by rewarding sites which incorporate videos in their website. Having a video on your website means you have a better chance at ranking higher on search engines.
Better word-of-mouth publicity
The single most important feature of Facebook is video and image sharing. That shows that people are more likely to share an interesting video than plain text. And the more your video is shared, the more word-of-mouth publicity you get. And word-of-mouth publicity always means better branding and more customers; another reason why videos form an important part of ecommerce website design.
Better convincing powers
“Images speak a thousand words”; and videos speak around a million. A demonstrative video about a product can convince the customers about the usability and quell any doubts they may have prior to buying. In other words, videos in ecommerce website design also result in higher conversion rates.
The engagement factor
What do you think is the reason behind the better pull factor of TV than radio? Yes, it is moving images, the visual part. Videos are always more engaging than written or spoken text, and it is all about engaging the users in this cut throat online world. Watching a video is less arduous a task than reading through a passage. Moreover, the reading is one of the rare arts today, thanks to the revolution in entertainment, which is another reason why videos should be incorporated in an ecommerce portal. Better engagement always means brand loyalty and a better chance at sales conversions.
The ROI factor and the decreasing costs
Videos have a higher ROI than any other form of online advertising and marketing. What matters even more are the falling costs of video production and updating content on a website? Most of these processes are getting automated today, which means they are less labor intensive and that means less expensive.
Virtual private server web hosting features are some of the most attractive to online businesses and site owners. With a VPS, you can have the best of both worlds: functionality unsurpassed and affordability that you will only find cheaper at the shared hosting level. If you are about to start a website or kick your growth plans in to overdrive, then you may wish to consider VPS for all of the ways that it can benefit your business. And these ways are considerable when you look at it compare with other hosting plans that are both less and more expensive. To fully understand how VPS can work for you, consider the following:
VPS offers a form of shared costs
By very definition, a virtual private server is a shared server with more power and more safety that your website can benefit from. The VPS blocks off users in their own separate chambers that are on the same server. These chambers believe that they are their own private server. While the power is not as much as, say, a dedicated or cloud hosting provider, it eliminates the crossover that tends to drag down websites on a shared hosting plan. As a result, the site runs faster and smoother and is less susceptible to downtime.
VPS offers a great way to manage your users
With reliable control panels and intuitive user features, it becomes easier to know more about who is stopping by your site and what they value about it. This information allows growth oriented business owners and site runners to better tailor their site to meet the needs of their visitors and to reach out in an effort to find more. The usability of VPS goes hand in hand with your ultimate purpose for having it in the first place. Shared hosting platforms do not have the strength or the protections to operate with a large amount of users, but if you are a small to medium sized business, the VPS can give your users a superior experience and have them coming back for more.
VPS beats the competition at both levels
If you are part of a shared hosting plan, then VPS beats your current platform hands down. However, if you are a large business, you may wish to opt instead for the dedicated server or the cloud hosting provider. Still, if you are a somewhat successful business with growth goals and a local reach, then VPS is the way to go because it keeps your site safe and your costs down.
As you decide on a hosting platform, keep these things in mind. Determine where you are as a business and where you hope to go, and then rest easy knowing that a VPS can get you there.
What causes arthritis?
In the majority of cases chronic pain is experienced by people who have been diagnosed with arthritis. And treating the condition is not as easy as it may seem. Doctors account over a hundred medical conditions linked to arthritis, which affect joints and surrounding areas. In fact, arthritis falls second after heart diseases as the primary cause for work incapacity and disability. And even the simplest everyday activities can become really hard to do because of the pain you get with arthritis.
Usually arthritis arises when there’s excessive joint wear and tear. As the body ages naturally there’s more wear to the joints than in a younger body. However, excessive use of certain joints can lead to arthritis at earlier stages of life, and one of the primary causes of such use is excessive weight. The main rule here is the better you treat your body and pay more attention to your health, the less likely you will develop arthritis.
Ways to avoid or decrease your chance of arthritis:
There are strategies you can employ to avoid the severe onset of arthritis, but the main thought here is that you have to treat your body just the right way well ahead before you are likely to develop the condition in order to relieve it.
Here are some tips on how to minimize the risk of suffering from chronic pain caused by arthritis:
Keep your weight within a healthy range. Having extra weight means you’ll have excessive wear and tear in the joints, especially in your legs and in your back.
Follow a regular exercise program. Having low physical activity will weaken your muscles, which will make the joints sustain a lot more pressure than with strong muscles. Having stronger muscles will lift the pressure from your joints and prolong their usability. But be careful to not over exercise and try to fit your weekly program into a single day. The main idea here is to distribute the pressure evenly, and by doing too much physical activity you risk of damaging your joints.
Try to make as little repetitive movements as possible. Such movements are the primary source of wear and tear to joints, so try to diversify your activities and avoid repeating the same motions without a need.
Follow a healthy dietary regimen and keep your hydration levels normal. Having enough water in your body provides the necessary lubrication and substance circulation, while healthy foods provide all the needed elements to keep the joints in a good shape for a longer period of time.
If pain strikes
Following the above mention tips will help you prevent the development of arthritis, but what if the pain suddenly strikes? One of the most effective ways to cope with chronic pain is to buy Tramadol. Tramadol is one of the most effective medications for strong chronic pain and many doctors recommend it when dealing with arthritis. However, you should take it exactly as prescribed by your doctor and not exceed the recommended dosage. Learn more about Tramadol before using it to make sure you’re treating pain effectively and with no risk to your health.
Can a graphic designer design a website? Of course!
But there are risks involved when someone who thinks in terms of paper and inches starts creating designs for screens and pixels.
In this article, we’ll look at what makes web design so different, and we’ll talk about what to look for in a site designer.
Usability
Ever clicked on a brochure or a business card? I didn’t think so.
On the web, your visitors take an active role in their own experience-meaning that if they don’t enjoy the experience, they’ll take action and leave.
A user-friendly site provides clear pathways to tools, products, or information. It communicates in the target audience’s language, and it doesn’t leave visitors frustrated, confused, or lost.
Take load time for example. Many designers get so caught up in creating fancy-schmancy landing pages that they forget the user. If your web page takes too long to appear-or if it fails to update users on loading status-you’ll lose visitors.
Think of it this way: if graphic designers are warriors in the battle against ugliness, web designers are warriors in the battle against ugliness and confusion.
Accessibility
This goes hand-in-hand with usability: make a site more accessible, and you’ll make it more user-friendly.
Accessibility is also a key area of difference between print and interactive: a graphic designer might not consider how a print piece will work for blind people, but a web designer must think about how a site will work for every potential visitor.
It’s not only possible to make websites accessible to people with disabilities-it’s often mandatory, as in the case of many government projects. And it should be. The web is an extremely useful tool for those with physical impairments.
And keep in mind that accessibility serves all users: in the words of Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer, “accessible design is good design.”
Ease of Updates
Every print piece is frozen in time. Once it rolls off the press, the text on that paper will be the same forever.
The Internet, on the other hand, is all about change. Interacting with an out-of-date site is like talking to a wall: it feels futile, lonely, and downright silly.
To make sure your site continues to feel current long after launch, your designer should forego the cutesy, clever, or trendy in favor of the clear, classic, and lasting.
Important considerations might include text vs. graphics, links vs. buttons, horizontal vs. vertical navigation, or the need for standard fonts (critical for dynamic text).
And, with content managers like Mighty-Site putting updates into the hands of site owners, web designers must create templates and style sheets that will continue to look great every time you update content, add pages, or change images on your site.
Search-Engine Friendliness
If you’re concerned with your rank in search listings, you need to choose a designer who’ll help you speak to search engines.
Some of the elaborate, flashy sites we see these days are in fact invisible to search robots.
A good interaction designer won’t let this happen: she’ll respect your SEO needs and create an attractive, content-ready design that search engines will love.
Browsers and Monitors
It’s true that computers and Internet browsers evolve quickly, but don’t forget that consumers are slow to change. We all know that guy who bought his monitor back in ’96 and still swears by it in 2008. In fact, around 8% of all web users still have their screen resolution set to 800×600 pixels.
A website that launches today might be viewed on hundreds of different screen types, in any of 4 major browsers. This means that words will wrap differently for different viewers, colors will fluctuate from one monitor to the next…the list goes on.
It’s hard to plan for this level of variability. But an experienced web designer knows how to handle the challenge.
That’s why at Orbit, we check every web design on a variety of monitors and test site functionality across all major current browsers and platforms. It’s an essential step in effectively catering to online audiences.
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