Designing Tips For Your Business Website – Part II | eCommerce and Marketing News & Tips

Designing Tips For Your Business Website – Part II

In our last installment we began discussing the tips that can help you create a successful and attractive website, which will meet all of your customers needs. Those first two tips were keeping it simple, and sticking with a plan. Both of these are rather general, so today I would like to discuss a few targeted tips that can help you to make sure that you have as effective and helpful an ecommerce site as you possibly can.

Tip 1 – Don’t Hold Back On Content

As a web developer, I have often come across clients who are looking for people to create low-quality content for as low a price as possible. This is quite offensive to me, as well as to others like me. But it should also be offensive to you, the potential buyer. You see, when you provide content on a website it isn’t necessarily expected to be a masterpiece of modern literature. You don’t have to commission someone who will treat it as such, and charge outrageous prices to do so.

However, you do need to have relevant, well written content filling your site, whether that content happens to be full articles, FAQ pages, About us pages, or just item descriptions. This is true even if you are hosting content for the sake of SEO or linkbaiting. It still has to be useful, interesting, and easy to read. If you refuse to pay for quality the first time around, you will end up paying more when you realize your content is ineffective, and you have to hire someone to fix it.

Tip 2 – Be Cautious About Advertising

There is nothing more irritating as a customer than going onto a site and finding it full of advertisements blinking all over the page. This is especially a problem for some small business, which hope to make heavier profits using advertising and affiliates. This is especially true if you have ads that frequently pop up over the screen and effect navigation, and can actually lose your customer loyalty very quickly.

I am not saying you should not have any ads, by any means. Of course they are needed, and can be useful in many ways. But all ads should be useful, tastefully placed, and should not dominate your site. Instead, they should be strategically placed where they will not hinder purchases, or make it difficult to view the layout. You should also be careful of what those ads contain, and that they are appropriate for the business you have.

Remember, everything on your site should reflect on the message you want to put out to your target customer base. That means that everything on your page should be directly related to what service or product you are trying to sell. Half of the battle is in the content and ads that are on your site, but of course this is not all there is to it.

Next week we will discuss layout, formatting, and tips on making your site look as clean as possible.