Thursday 26 January 2012

How a Well Designed and Well Maintained Website is a Money Spinner







One of the most critical steps in creating a new web site is the design phase. If this crucial phase is skipped then the results are: site difficult to navigate, purpose of site difficult to recognize, too many graphics and not enough text, bad colors, and other obvious errors.

Before designing the website think for a while. What is the purpose of your site? What do you want a visitor to do? Buy something? Send you emails? Join an association? Whatever your purpose, that's what your site should be designed for. If you want your visitor to purchase something, then you must make it easy and convenient. Everything must flow to the purchase, and nothing must stand in the way. If you want them to join your association, then flow your site to that.

Take a look at some of the rules to be followed while designing a website
  • ALWAYS link back to your home page. You have to give your visitor a way back to the rest of the site no matter where he lands. This is critical.
  • Put a button on every single page which allows your visitors to send you an email. A form is better than going to the email program because you have more control of the format and what questions you can ask.
  • Make sure your color scheme works. You should not hurt your visitor's eyes.
  • Pay attention to load times. Don't include big graphics, or if you must then thumbnail them to be kind to your less patient visitors.
  • Stay legal - don't steal images, text or bandwidth.
  • Stick to the point. You want your visitor to do something - don't wander around or you may lose him.
  • Design for search engines. Include meta-tags, ALT tags on images and you MUST be sure to include a descriptive title.
After the successful website and graphic design there are many things that have to be done on a regular basis to ensure that the web site remains useful and functional. Some of the tasks are listed below:

Check your links
This task has to be performed on a regular basis. This is the tendency for broken links to appear all over a site. It is most common with external links but can occur occasionally with internal links.

Change Your Site
People expect sites on the web to be constantly changing. If your site is static and unchanging there is no reason for someone to come back again. One major way to return them is to change the content often and to be sure that your visitors know it is changing.

Stay Up-to-Date
Stay up-to-date on new technologies which you can use to improve your web site. In addition, getting certified, joining organizations and attending conferences is essential to stay current and active.

Check Your Site's Security
Learn as much as you can about web site security, and ensure that, to the best of your abilities and knowledge, that your site is secure. This ensures that your customers and visitors information remains confidential and safe. It also protects you and your web host from harm.

Choose the right Web Development Company who creates a Website Design and maintenance plan that will ensure your web site is performing at its optimum level. This is essential if you wish to maintain or increase sales and stay ahead of your competitors.

About 8trackweb-8 Track Web is a leading professional Web Design, Graphic &Logo Design and Web Development Company in San Diego, California with specialist Graphic Designers and Content Developers delivering creative and effective results. For more information visit our website www.8trackweb.com

Thursday 12 January 2012

Ecommerce Web Design for Small Business








When starting a brand-new online store for a small business, it is better to choose a pre-existing design template rather than a design done from scratch.

• Templates. If you are not quite sure what kind of design you'd like, you can browse through the design templates included with most hosted online store programs.

• Themes. Some online store builders take the design template concept one step further, with "themes." Themes are essentially templates that include not only basic design elements but also text styles such as font faces and sizes. Themes also allow for slightly different pages across a website with a single unified design, without having to configure each page individually. For instance, a web store theme might include a product description page, a product category page, an "add to cart" page, and a checkout page. Just by choosing a single theme, you have all the pages in the shopping cart designed with a single, unified professional design.

• Theme builder. If you want to make changes to a theme–say a different font or a different color–some web store software packages make it easy with a "theme builder." With the theme builder, you can select values for features such as color and font. You can even choose to build a theme from scratch. You don't need to know anything about HTML; the interface will be much like a word processing program.
Building Your Online Store: Inventory
The foundation of any online store is the products or services being sold. With most web store and shopping cart software packages, the functions for adding, removing, and pricing items are collectively called "inventory."

One of the great things about using a hosted web store software package is that if you do have trouble setting something up, you can get help quickly from customer service.
Adding New Web Pages to an Online Store
If you want to add new pages to your online store, the store creator software can help. If all you want is to add a new product, you only have to use the "add a product" feature, which is often listed under "inventory."
However, if you want to add pages for sales copy, manuals, privacy policies, terms and conditions, the store creator interface is the way to do it. Most online store creators have a way of adding pages to a web store without having to use HTML; you simply type in your text in the form and upload any images.


Getting Your Store Found in Search Engines
In order for your online store to generate the most business possible, you’ll want to make sure that your store is easily searchable for Internet shoppers. Unfortunately, some web stores create pages using a dynamic script that search engines cannot index.
The best way to check whether a web store or shopping cart software produces "search-engine-friendly" pages is to check the documentation; software that's search-engine-friendly will usually say so.

While choosing a company for your ecommerce website design project, make sure that your new ecommerce store is user friendly, professional and search engine friendly. Once you have the ecommerce web site you've been waiting for, show it to the online world by advertising through pay per click and SEO services and let everyone know about the products or services you offer.


About 8trackweb-8 Track Web is a leading professional Web Design, Graphic &Logo Design and Web Development Company in San Diego, California with specialist Graphic Designers and Content Developers delivering creative and effective results. For more information visit our website www.8trackweb.com