E-commerce sites can be designed by yourself or you can buy a template to do the job of a professional. It must look professional, it must be easy to navigate around and the content must be to a very high quality to assist in your ecommerce SEO. It must be hosted with a reputable source which does not allow downtime and which offers consistent and reliable technical support. It must be secure from intruders because this is the place where you collect sensitive information about your customers such as their personal details and their financial details.

Start by planning your site on paper. Define your goals and purpose for the site. In other words, why do you need it and what do you expect it to do for you. Next you need to develop your strategic plan. Now you are ready to design the site accordingly.

Steps to help in the planning

You need to know who you are targeting and how you will design the site to suit their needs. How they will navigate through it and what your pages will look like. What font, colours and graphics will suit your branding? What content are you going to offer your visitors, and who will be responsible for writing it?

How will you build trust with your customers and what payments methods will you offer? Will the site have sufficient security controls and how will you deliver your product?

How are you going to drive traffic to your site and how will you market your product? How will you optimise your site for the search engines?

Planning is nothing short of writing a business case and if you want to build a solid ecommerce site you will need to identify the focus of the intended website, the needs of your customers and research into what your competition is doing.

Don’t make these mistakes

E-commerce sites have to be appealing and easy to use. Visitors need to be enticed to stop and purchase while seeming to flow through the sales process.

Mistake 1: No contact data! Visitors need to be given a choice, either telephonically, by fax or by email. You must also publish your address.

Mistake 2: Doing too much with your fonts and colours. Two or three different fonts running through the site is more than sufficient. Too many colours are distracting.

Mistake 3: Using outdated information, to attract and keep visitors returning content must be fresh and up to date. Remove broken links too and ensure the links you do have are always working. On this note, compile a list of all your pages, link them to a sitemap so that don’t end up with any orphaned pages.

Mistakes 4, 5, 6 & 7: Disabling the ‘back’ button, this annoys visitors. Having slow loading pages is caused by having too many large images or as a result of sharing a server. A search facility is a fundamental component which should be offered to your visitors and lastly, you can lose customers if your site is not compatible with the browser most of them are using.

Mistakes 8 & 9: Photos that cannot be enlarged for close viewing are not a good thing to have on an e-commerce site. Shoppers need to be able to see every little detail. And if your site is full of graphics and no content you won’t get high rankings in a search engine and your potential customers won’t be able to find your product.

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