Undeniably, we can say that the Internet has become an essential part in everyone’s life. Apart from basic necessities at home, including utensils in the kitchen, television and music system in dressing or living room, a computer system with the Internet connectivity somewhere in the corner of a room has become a mandatory factor to make a home look complete and worth living.
The power of the Internet is now not only limited to software professionals or computer engineers but even a housewife needed it for proper home management, paying bills and do correct shopping of household to other luxury items.
People are highly dependent on online available resources and applications, they prefer to invest more time researching on a product before going to buy it, may be online or offline.
With huge competition online and this advanced buying strategy of the people has become a great and serious challenge for any Internet marketers. They are feeling the urgency of making their online resources informative, attractive and potent enough to entice the web traffic to click on their website links, halt there, explore the site, and ultimately turn to potential customers with a satisfaction level to take up site’s services in future too.
Hence your business success rate depends on how useful your online portal is. I think, an online marketer needs effective e-commerce website, built using contemporary tools and techniques to give complete ease of site navigation and specialized shopping cart facility to let people comfortably place order and buy items or services online.
And now if you said, yes! I need a highly approachable e-commerce website to diversify the existing business and make it presentable to web traffic then you must contact a genuine and reliable e-commerce application Development Company for the same, taking care not to fall on the hands of the deceivers.
For any business to exist, grow progressively and later exponentially, it needs a good customer base. You must concentrate on winning the heart of customers by providing satisfying and quality services once they visit and take up your services. There are lots of features available that can be included in e-commerce sites which can help retain the customers and make them return to the site over and over again.
Since online shopping involves extracting user’s critical information like name, address, profession, credit card details and many other core elements, the developed website must be robust, secure and scalable and your showed security policies must convince people to carry out online transaction without any confusion or fear.
Therefore, if you are an online marketing aspirant, you must first make a handsome one-time investment on making an effective e-commerce website that allows visitors to search and find quality services and products, and at the same time give them the ease of procuring the items reliably, very fast just with the click of a mouse.
If the online goal is set well and steps approached carefully, there is no doubt you can take yourself on top of your competitors in no time. Good luck!
•A great website design and content
•Website visitors flock to their websites and more importantly enjoy the experience.
•Learned how to successfully market and promote their website online with little or no paid advertising.
•Learned how to easily build their customer bases and attract repeat sales
•Worked out how to effectively optimize their website for the search engines
•Learned the ‘insider secrets’ of how to rank well on the search engines and stay there.
This article will examine the key website design features that help create a Top Ranking Website. From an SEO perspective at a very minimum ensure you include full content management, a marketing module and comprehensive website statistics in your initial website design.
Key design specifications of Rank 1 Websites
1.Complete content management control – including the ability to add, edit and delete pages, boxes, tables, hyperlinks and the footer in ‘real time’ without the need for a programmer. Plus the ability to add hyperlinks to pages, images and documents.
2.Customer databases – to collect member and customer contact information for ordering and direct marketing purposes.
3.Marketing module – to send out emails, monthly newsletters, product updates, order notifications, dispatch notifications and new member letters to customers & members in your customer databases.
4.Comprehensive website statistics – to monitor the daily, weekly and monthly progress of your website’s SEO campaign, online marketing campaigns, linking campaigns and site popularity. An excellent website statistic collection software tool is ‘Awstats’.
5.Visually appealing home page design that incorporates your company branding.
6.The inclusion of a footer at the bottom of the home page and subsequent web pages for search engine optimization.
7.Fast website download speed for web pages, images and documents to reduce the incidence of ‘bounce out’ traffic.
8.Easy to use site navigation with a flat site hierarchy .ie. each page is accessible from only 1 to 3 clicks away from the home page.
9.A home page design with a mix of text and images ideally in a 60/40 ratio .ie. 60% text and 40% images/graphics for maximizing keyword text content for SEO.
10.Easy to view font style, font colour and background colour in the website design and content.
11.Easy to navigate shopping cart software
12.A currency converter for international trade
13.Automatic payment gateways for credit card processing and Paypal in ‘real time’ with flexible payment options for customers.
14.SSL Certificates installed and logos prominently displayed for secure online ordering.
15.A professional website design versus a DIY website design – professionally designed websites attract higher website traffic levels, higher online sales, higher site popularity and better search engine rankings than DIY website designs. Allow $10,000 AU for a professionally designed E-commerce website with branding specialist fees included.
16.A website design that accommodates the global reach of the Internet – ie. English translations of site content, a currency converter, economical freight delivery methods for international customers, automatic calculations of freight costs, compatible payment methods for overseas customers.
17.Member logins – to facilitate easier ordering from customers especially repeat sales, direct marketing purposes and wholesale logins (if required) to keep your wholesale prices confidential from the general public and competitors.
18.Avoid the use of ‘Pop-ups’ – for adding products to the shopping cart, online forms and product images as some Internet protection software on a User’s PC can block pop-ups and interfere with the browsing experience, the ability to complete online forms and place online orders. Program pages & images to ‘refresh’ rather than pop-up in your website design.
19.Interesting & fresh website content for your website visitors – including clear detailed product photographs & product descriptions, interesting page content relevant to your products/services and industry, free articles of interest and PDF downloads, DIY projects if applicable, promotion of specials, affiliate advertising, complimentary reciprocal links and resource pages.
Tip – Select a horizontal page orientation for your website design that fills up the entire internet explorer browser window or alternatively ensure that you minimize the gaps running down either side of a vertical page orientation site design. The reasoning behind this is that eyes of users are automatically drawn to negative spaces before they focus on filled spaces. You can also add boxes to balance out and fill any negative spaces on the outer left and right hand side of home page designs. These boxes can be filled with information about specials, promotions, affiliate advertising, sales and so on.
Remember that first impressions, in particular a great home page design will determine whether website visitors stay to explore your website further or ‘bounce out’ in the first 60 seconds, that’s all the opportunity you have.
For more detailed information on the key design features of top ranking websites see my SEO ebook the ‘Insider Secrets of Rank 1 Websites’ by Rosemary Donald for just $29.95 AU.
Both Sharon Lepcha & Rosemary Donald 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.
Rosemary Donald has sinced written about articles on various topics from The Internet, Pets and Legal Matters. Rosemary Donald is an SEO Consultant with Rank1 Website Marketing (www.rank1websitemarketing.com) and author of the SEO ebook ‘Insider Secrets of Rank 1 Websites’. Rosemary is a regular contributor of SEO articles on search engine optimization, SE tactic. Rosemary Donald's top article generates over 5400 views. to your Favourites.