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Do's and Don'ts in Web Design - part 2 (content)
<strong><font COLOR="#009900">Do know your audience</font></strong>
It's important to know your audience.
If you write for a site that sells toys you'll use other words, colors, images etc. compared to a site for online...
Keeping Your Site Current
It's imperative that your website's information be current. This can prevent you from many problems with your clients. If you have anything on your site that's date sensitive, such as a sale, promotion, coupon or similar items that have expiration...
Sensational Web Design Advice
Are you one of those people who would love to have your own
personal or business website, but feel you are unable to afford
it? In this article, I explain about how to obtain a quality web
design on the cheap. There are also some superb...
Why a CSS Website Layout Will Make You Money
Although CSS layouts have been around for years, they haven't become so commonplace until recently. This was basically due to limited browser support (especially from Netscape 4) - nowadays though, CSS 2.0 (which introduced positioning) is...
Why Hire a Professional to Design Your Web Site?
Creating an appealing, functional, and effective Web site is much harder than it looks. It's not simply a matter of taking a company brochure or catalog, converting the text to HTML, and throwing in a few pictures (although many sites seem to have...
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Designing for Sales
One thing that lots of designers don't seem to understand is
that there's a big difference between the kind of design you
should use if you're trying to present information (usually with
ads), and the kind of design you should use if the aim of your
website is to make sales. This distinction causes a lot of
confusion, bad design, and, ultimately, lost sales. If you're
trying to sell, then there's a whole other set of design
principles that you need to follow.
The Headline is Everything
If you want your website to make sales for you, then the first
thing you need to pay attention to is the headline on your sales
page. It needs to be large, to stand out, and to grab the
visitors' attention. It should give a clear benefit (not a
feature) of your product that you think would appeal to most
people. If you have a bad headline then people won't even look
at the rest of what you've written - they'll just press the back
button.
Always Be Ready to Make the Sale
As soon as a visitor gets to your product's page, it should be
absolutely crystal clear what they've got to do to buy the
product. If it's a long page, then 'buy' buttons should be
scattered throughout. If a visitor could look at any part of
your page and wonder where they have to click to buy the
product, then there's something fundamentally wrong with your
website's design.
Make Happy Customers Prominent
On a sales page you should have a space for feedback that has
been left by previous customers, whether it's in the form of
reviews or testimonials. This gives people an opportunity to
read a supposedly objective view of your product, and makes them
feel better about spending their money on it. Of course, this
means that you need to solicit feedback from previous customers
to put in that space - a good way of doing this is to offer
rewards for customers who contribute in this way.
Pay Attention to Payment
You need to make sure that your payment page - that is, the page
where you collect credit card details - is well laid out and
easy to use. Doing things like making it difficult to type in a
credit card
number or making it confusing to choose what kind of
card you have is likely to damage the customer's confidence in
you and your website. This page should be professional and
standard - don't be tempted to do anything unusual with it.
Highlight Special Bonuses
To help persuade potential customers who are on the fence about
whether to buy or not to buy, you should take care to highlight
any special bonuses that purchasing your product will give them.
For example, a physical product might come with free delivery,
and a non-physical product might come with a free ebook. Don't
go overboard and have a ridiculous number of bonuses, but do add
enough to make the customer feel like they're getting very good
value for their money.
Keep It Simple
When you're designing a website that is going to be used to sell
products, you've got to keep things as simple as possible on the
technical side. That's because the more complicated functions
you use, the more things there are that could go wrong and stop
them from buying anything from you. It's better that people see
a slightly less fancy website than that they don't see one at
all because if they don't see your website then they won't be
doing any shopping there.
To understand the basics of how e-commerce websites work you
should look at as many other websites as you can. Write down the
elements that they all seem to have in common - for example,
shopping carts - and you will gradually figure out which things
are essentials and which things are just bells and whistles.
Your website should leaev out everything but the essentials, but
make the essential things very easy to do. That is the key so
successful e-commerce design, and if you can manage it then it
will be very rewarding for you and your website.
About the author:
Original Source: Eclipse-Articles.com
Information supplied and written by Lee Asher of Eclipse Domain
Services
Domain Names, Hosting, Traffic and Email Solutions.
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