I'm a firm believer that the “wow” factor is provided by a website's content, starting with its images. However, images can be a website's greatest asset but they can also be its Achillie's Heel.
In a recent blog we talked about how you can encourage users to leave product reviews. Quite often though, when you first enable product reviews in your online store, customers see there are none and can be reluctant to contribute. So how do you get the ball rolling wiith product reviews on your site?
Last week we talked about using your product descriptions as a selling tool. One thing that is often overlooked though is the role that the snippets presented in the search results have in getting customers to your site. If the text that you use for your descriptions doesn’t grab the customers’ attention, they will immediately move to the next result and they might never get to see what you have to offer on your site.
In my last blog we looked at the increasing Google focus on website usability in their algorithm. In this blog we’ll start to look at some of the principles of good usability design, and as it is such an involved subject we’ll split the blog over a few posts.
On the surface, the question “Did you build your website for your users?” sounds pretty stupid, but in reality a great many websites are built with search engine optimisation in mind rather than the user experience.
That’s a question I often ask an ecommerce store owner, and surprisingly frequently, it’s clear that the site hasn’t been thought about in those terms.
It’s very easy to get caught up in the jargon of online commerce; conversion rates, cart abandonment, fulfillment systems etc etc, and of course these things are all important. The problem with focusing on the technology though is that we tend to forget the psychology of buying and selling.
A product landing page is your opportunity to showcase your favourite or best selling products to a wider audience. These specialist pages are opportunities to spread your creative wings a little and provide information that would otherwise crowd the product’s actual shop page with too much information.
Many businesses developing their first ecommerce website seriously underestimate the amount of time required to properly develop the site. In actual fact, the technical side of things is quite straightforward, and it’s the creation of high quality images and writing of good product descriptions that really takes the time.
Almost always when we’re talking to business owners about a new website development, we ask what work has been done on branding their business, as it is extremely important to understand what messages the website style and design need to project. However, this is usually interpreted as whether the business has a logo and graphic identifier for the business.
Brand and branding are different and understanding what brand is will help with the activities that are part of branding. I found an excellent description of brand and branding by EC (Lisa) Stewart on the website “Indie Creative”.
In my previous blog I mentioned some research that showed that negative product reviews were beneficial as they added credibility and balance in the eyes of your customers.
Looking around a variety of websites though, you see many sites that have reviews enabled but few, if any, reviews. So the question is, how to you encourage customers or even site visitors to review a product?
Page headings and web text colour your site and when executed effectively they jolt your readers into action. So what are your website's titles saying to your customers? Does your Home page present with a, "Welcome to our website" or a more enticing, "Australia's best floral wedding arrangements delivered FREE to your door!".
In some ways this might seem like an odd topic for a blog but it’s a question that we get asked over and over. In the web design business, we see some horrific examples of sites created purely for SEO that are almost impossible for anyone to read, and we see the graphic design focused sites that are almost invisible to search engines. So what is more important - web design or SEO?
I decided to write this article for the benefit of website managers (or "webmasters") in charge of their company's online presence. In particular, webmasters who may not have a grounding in design or at least an understanding of the importance of design and web site presentation; webmasters who have an emotional attachment to their web site and who may have become "shop blind" to the possibility that their site is no longer the cutting edge presence that it once was.
As you might have seen from our blogs and newsletters over the last few months, we’ve been very active with our product development, new directions on our website (including blogs) and much effort to improve our customer response times, etc. Some of this activity has happened, as it should, in response to our customers’ feedback.
Most web image faux pas relate to poor save quality and the format in which they're saved out, i.e. .jpg, .png, .gif, as well as inappropriate file sizes (possibly the greatest faux pas of them all).
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