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[F857]Free Website Ecommerce Templates

by Adrian Lawrence, Adr

If you're thinking of designing your own website, you can save a lot of money by using ecommerce templates. While a website is a must if you want your business to grow, it can be a very costly project, especially if you hire someone else to help with the job. Although you may not consider yourself talented enough to design the site yourself, you will be surprised at how much easier it is to design web pages using ecommerce templates. With a little practice and effort, most business owners are able to design a professional looking site on their own.

Ecommerce templates provide webmasters with a preset look for their site. While you still need to enter in the HTML code for your text, the amount of code you will need to write using a template is much less than if you had designed the whole site on your own. For example, with a template you will not need to write the code to design tables and frames. A template is like an outline design for your site. All you really need to add is the written content.

There are several companies that specialize in designing templates. It is a good idea to do some research first before deciding upon a specific template. Shop around to see what different companies have to offer. Be sure to choose a template that gives you the look you desire for your site. Although there are some companies that offer templates free of charge, these may not be enough to meet your needs. Some templates are designed more for homepages or personal websites. In order to have an effective ecommerce website, you will want to choose a template that is both simple and professional looking. If you want customers to purchase products or services via your ecommerce site, they need to feel comfortable ordering from you first. A professional looking site that is pleasing to the eye may help to encourage customers who are a little hesitant. How you present your business and product is almost as important as the product itself.

Another factor you will want to take into consideration when building an ecommerce website is time. Even if you are doing all of the work yourself, you will still be concerned with the amount of time that it takes for you to complete the entire project. Using ecommerce templates are a much quicker process than designing all of the pages yourself. If you are a novice or inexperienced webmaster, the task of creating several web pages can be very frustrating. Even if there is just a small error in your code, it can mess up the look of the whole page. In some cases, it can even affect the ability of visitors to view your site. If you are constantly checking your source code for errors, it will slow down the whole process of designing the site. In the business world, time is a valuable asset. The sooner your website is finished and uploaded to the server, the sooner you can start earning money through your business online.

The cost to purchase templates for your site is just a fraction of what it would cost you to hire someone to design the whole site from scratch. Good quality templates can be purchased for fewer than one hundred dollars. The cost to hire a webmaster or team of technical workers to design your site can easily end up costing you thousands of dollars. If you can design a quality website for less money, using ecommerce templates can be a valuable resource.

If you check around online, you will discover that there are many successful ecommerce stores and websites that used templates when building their site. Templates are a very popular choice among those designing their first website and individuals who have a limited knowledge of HTML. In fact, the number of websites designed by the use of templates outnumbers the number of custom designed sites.

* Pillar 1) Website Traffic Strategy : a steady volume of new visitors interested in your website and products

* Pillar 2) List Building Strategy : a steady stream of new people joining your "interest group" receiving newsletters and autoresponders

* Pillar 3) Products and Services Stack: a growing set of related services and products that you offer to your "interest group" lists

If these pillars are not perfectly clear to you then you'd better read these guides carefully. Most ecommerce failure (or lack of growth) can be easily explained as having a missing or weak pillar. For example, a company with a weak traffic growth strategy will become increasingly dependent on expensive advertising whereas a company with a weak product stack will not be able to tap into pure-profit zones such as upsales,follow-up sales. Likewise, a poor list-building strategy forces the entire business model to be dependent on day-to-day traffic -- ouch!!

The Foundation: a Content Oriented Website

Before we dive into some powerful traffic-building techniques, let's build the foundation with what I'll be calling the "Content Oriented Website" -- or just "COW". The COW is the basic unit of value on the internet -- it feeds the search engines with useful information and acts as the desired destination for people seeking answers. Not every COW needs to be ecommerce-related. You could create a hobby COW about some topic you passionately love.

For example, you could create an informative website about your local church history. You might call that a "sacred COW". Our focus here will be creating an online business -- so really what we're going to be talking about is a "cash COW". Got it?

Ok, I promise to avoid mention of "milking the COW"....

The Ecommerce Cash Cow

Let's try to define our term:

* A "Cash Cow" is a website containing lots of really useful content -- carefully designed to attract a steady flow of visitors and convert them into a permanent customer base.

One big mistake people often make getting started in ecommerce is to think that "coming up with a product" is the hardest part of the game. In fact, having a great product is useless without a customer base. You'll be shocked at how easy it is to come up with useful products to sell once you've developed a successful and useful content-rich website.

Organizing your Content Pasture for Search Engine Grazing

There are many ways to get good traffic online and they all involve giving away something cool and free. Our COW model will use useful free information. For example, if you your company is dedicated to selling home-repair manuals, you need lots of pages of free information about every aspect of home repair. Such content is going to suck visitors in from the search engines.

Note: contrary to what you may have heard, good content will not automagically turn into traffic.

For that, we will need to create lots of totally unique content following a "search-friendly" strategy. Of course, unique is the easy part -- "search friendly", on the other hand, is an absurdly loaded term describing a page which is strategically designed to be loved by search engines.

We're not talking about any shady or unethical practices here. But what we need is to use all important ethical search sweetening tactics to organize our COW site to act -- as much as possible -- as a search-engine magnet. To accomplish this, we'll have to think like search engines and strive for what I call "high topic clarity" or "keyword focused". That is, we must provide the search engine with a consistently clear message about our content.

In other words, think about your content from the perspective of the search engine. For example, just visualize the little googlebot working hard to figure out what the heck your home page is all about (say your company is "Soil Depot, Inc."). The little guy tries real hard but all your web pages keep linking to your home page with the word "home" -- well that's just plain confusing for the poor little googlebot. So have some compassion and instead link to your home page using the phrase "Soil Depot".

"High topic clarity" is all about working with the search engine instead of against it. This is not a slimy trick but simply giving the search engine what it wants. On the other hand, since 99% of websites out there do not provide topic clarity, your ecommerce company will have a distinct advantage!

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Both Adrian Lawrence & Chad Quick are contributors for EditorialToday. The above articles have been edited for relevancy and timeliness. All write-ups, reviews, tips and guides published by EditorialToday.com and its partners or affiliates are for informational purposes only. They should not be used for any legal or any other type of advice. We do not endorse any author, contributor, writer or article posted by our team.

Adrian Lawrence has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet, Property Guide and Computers and The Internet. Mark is a webmaster with Discount Domains a leading Budget house. Please feel free to republish this article provided a working hyperlink. Adrian Lawrence's top article generates over 12100 views. to your Favourites.

Chad Quick has sinced written about articles on various topics from Computers and The Internet. Chad is a developer for ezinedesigner.comLearn how our Easy will boost your Ecommerce revenue.. Chad Quick's top article generates over 1900 views. to your Favourites.