We have scoured the internet looking for tips to share with you to try to help you with your websites.
Below is a list of interesting articles that we hope would help you.
Please email us with any feedback regarding topics you would like to see posted.
How to Make your Website Sing
Build a bad-looking small-business site filled with poorly written text, and your potential customers will go away. Build one that is attractive, compelling and clever, but crucial design mistakes will still guarantee that few people will know that the site exists.
Welcome to the Exciting World of Ecommerce
The world of ecommerce can be a great place to invest, and a great place to open a business. This article provides an overview of this exciting market.
Four Ways to Increase Online Sales
Small changes - like improving your customer checkout process - can have a big effect on how many people end up buying from your site.
3 Top Tips on Making Profit Through Your Website
Discover how to avoid missing out on substantial new business through your website with these 3 top tips.
Making Money Online: Persistence is the Key
Establishing a profitable E-commerce site is a tough job nowadays. Thousands of companies are struggling against each other to get more and more profit out of the internet. You should use each and every scheme and method you can find to augment your sales.
10 Ways to Lose Web Sales
The first step to avoiding web design mistakes is knowing what they are.
E-Commerce- Most Important Parts
All e-commerce websites need to provide certain information to their visitors. Doing so will convert visitors into customers.
Build Your Internet Business For Success
For you internet based business, you need to have a clear understanding as to the fact that you are not simply just selling some product, but you are consuming people time! This is one of the most forgotten issues.
5 Ways To Make Your E-commerce Website More Competitive
Shopping online has many benefits. Knowing them can save you time and money.
Shoppers Expect a Bargain Online
Shoppers expect a bargain when they connect to your website for online shopping. They might browse your shopping website out of curiosity, but they'll only buy when they find real bargains. Your challenge is to appeal to whatever combination of price and products or services they want to capture their business.
Tuesday, December 4, 2007
Monday, December 3, 2007
Welcome to the Exciting World of Ecommerce
The simple word ecommerce means many different things to many different people. To some of us, ecommerce means the ability to buy that great new book at 4 in the morning from our favorite online bookstore. To others, ecommerce means cleaning out the closet and making some money by putting those unwanted treasures up for sale at our favorite online auction house. To others, ecommerce means the ability to have different businesses connect seamlessly and cost efficiently, and the business to business world of ecommerce is one of the fastest growing segments of the market.
Ecommerce allows suppliers to easily connect with buyers of finished products, and business people to easily compare prices and quality among different suppliers. The Internet also provides a wealth of information, and this information is an integral part of the ecommerce solution.
When the Internet first emerged on the scene, it was used by government agencies as a secure way to communicate with one another. Even when the Internet became the province of ordinary users, it was mostly a playground for college students and computer geeks. It took quite some time for the commercial potential of the Internet to be exploited, and the first ecommerce companies were quite primitive by today’s standards. Some of those first ecommerce companies are still around and stronger than ever, while others failed to make a profit. Anyone interested in opening an ecommerce business of their own would do well to study the history of ecommerce and the Internet for important lessons.
Despite the bursting of the Internet bubble, ecommerce continues to have nearly unlimited potential for smart entrepreneurs. In fact, the world of ecommerce offers so many advantages over traditional brick and mortar businesses that it simply cannot be ignored. While a brick and mortar business needs to rent space and hire employees, a start up ecommerce business can be run from a single computer as a one man or one woman operation. Many of the most successful ecommerce businesses got their start in just such a manner, and more and more ecommerce startups are born every day.
There have been a great many changes in the world of business over the last couple of decades, but perhaps no change has been more important than that of the Internet. The World Wide Web has become so important in our lives that many of our children could not conceive of a world without it. Business has been changed in many ways by the power of technology, affecting everything from the way we get hired to the way we do our jobs.
For more information on the world of ecommerce visit http://www.ecommercesold.com
How to Make Your Web Site Sing for You
The idea that if you build it, they will come, might have worked for Kevin Costner in the movie “Field of Dreams,” but it certainly does not hold true for Web sites.
Build a bad-looking small-business site filled with poorly written text, and your potential customers will go away. Build one that is attractive, compelling and clever, but crucial design mistakes will still guarantee that few people will know that the site exists.
Your Web site is like a digital business card, designers say, the first online look at your company that a customer gets. With luck, it will not be the last.
It is not just small operations that make a mishmash of their sites. Large companies can be just as prone to major design mistakes.
One global company states on its home page that “Indigenous and proven career management tools coupled with a comprehensive series of integrated initiatives have been evolved, to ensure that employees continue to sustain a high performance culture, while recruitment and selection is based on necessary competencies.”
That is “just gobbledygook,” Mr. Flanders said. “The words are not understandable by humans.”
According to Jakob Nielsen, a Web site consultant and author of the book “Prioritizing Web Usability,” it is essential that a Web page get a company’s message across quickly, because visitors are a fickle bunch. Most people do not go beyond what is in front of their faces.
Studies by Mr. Nielsen’s company, the Nielsen Norman Group, an Internet design firm in Fremont, Calif., show that only 50 percent of Web visitors scroll down the screen to see what lies below the visible part on their PC monitor.
“Users spend 30 seconds reviewing a home page,” Mr. Nielsen said. “A business must encapsulate what they do in very few words.”
With findings like those, it is no wonder that Web pages must visually hit a visitor right between the eyes. If a site does not answer a user’s questions about a business, then you have scored one for the competition. For example, the first thing customers visiting any restaurant’s Web site want to know is when it is open. But often that information can be found only by digging through multiple pages. As a result, “the site fails,” Mr. Nielsen said.
“It’s all about the basics,” said Baris Cetinok, Microsoft’s director of product management for Office Live, a site that offers free Web hosting and design tools for small businesses.
Visitors must immediately find out “who you are, what you do and how people can reach you,” Mr. Cetinok said.
Besides good grammar, Mr. Nielsen suggests that companies list a physical address, include a photograph of the building and not ask potential clients to fill out a form simply to ask a question. “That immediately communicates danger,” he said.
Making a site look good is complicated by the fact that no two monitors will necessarily present the Web in the same way. Users can set their browser’s default font size to be bigger or smaller, so it is impossible to know exactly how text will appear to any one person.
And how much of a Web site’s home page can actually be seen by users varies, based on the screen’s resolution.
The problems are made worse by designers being in Los Angeles or New York, and not, say, Texas, so “they think everyone has a large monitor and a fast D.S.L. connection,” said Neil Hettinger, co-owner of Lead Pencil Ad Design, a marketing and design company in Manhattan Beach, Calif. He suggests mixing text and graphics on a Web site, with dark type set against a light background for easy reading.
If you are selling a product, use thumbnail photos that can be enlarged when clicked on, Mr. Nielsen said, not a graphic that can be rotated in every direction. Otherwise “you see products at weird angles.”
“The most important rule in Web page design is to eliminate unnecessary design,” Mr. Flanders said. He recommends not adding large, spinning graphics that take a long time to download.
He also advises business owners not to add introductory splash pages that force a viewer to watch a video or animation.
“Splash pages are only needed for pornography, gambling and multinational Web sites that need to direct users to a particular country’s page,” Mr. Flanders said.
Graphics also do nothing to help a site get discovered by search engines like Google or Yahoo. Those sites troll the Internet for key words, as well as the frequency and quality of one site that links to another.
Text embedded in a graphic, like the name of a shop in a photograph, cannot be seen by search engines. And the old practice of embedding key words in white-on-white type will not increase a site’s page ranking; in fact it will do the opposite.
“The first time a word is used on a site, it’s significant,” said Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer. “If that word is used 50 times, there is a diminishing return.”
“If you put hidden tags on your page, you’re a total moron,” Mr. Flanders said. “You will get caught by search engines, or others will turn you in.”
If your business is local, make sure that the entire geographic area you serve is mentioned in text on the site. To increase the number of sites that link to yours, list your business in online trade directories, and mention it on various blogs.
Google offers free Web master tools that automatically analyze a site to determine if it is being optimized by search engines.
In the end, getting a prominent placement in a search engine is the only way to ensure that your site will be seen by those who can increase your business.
“If your site is not listed on the first page of search results, you might as well not exist,” Mr. Nielsen said.
Build a bad-looking small-business site filled with poorly written text, and your potential customers will go away. Build one that is attractive, compelling and clever, but crucial design mistakes will still guarantee that few people will know that the site exists.
Your Web site is like a digital business card, designers say, the first online look at your company that a customer gets. With luck, it will not be the last.
It is not just small operations that make a mishmash of their sites. Large companies can be just as prone to major design mistakes.
One global company states on its home page that “Indigenous and proven career management tools coupled with a comprehensive series of integrated initiatives have been evolved, to ensure that employees continue to sustain a high performance culture, while recruitment and selection is based on necessary competencies.”
That is “just gobbledygook,” Mr. Flanders said. “The words are not understandable by humans.”
According to Jakob Nielsen, a Web site consultant and author of the book “Prioritizing Web Usability,” it is essential that a Web page get a company’s message across quickly, because visitors are a fickle bunch. Most people do not go beyond what is in front of their faces.
Studies by Mr. Nielsen’s company, the Nielsen Norman Group, an Internet design firm in Fremont, Calif., show that only 50 percent of Web visitors scroll down the screen to see what lies below the visible part on their PC monitor.
“Users spend 30 seconds reviewing a home page,” Mr. Nielsen said. “A business must encapsulate what they do in very few words.”
With findings like those, it is no wonder that Web pages must visually hit a visitor right between the eyes. If a site does not answer a user’s questions about a business, then you have scored one for the competition. For example, the first thing customers visiting any restaurant’s Web site want to know is when it is open. But often that information can be found only by digging through multiple pages. As a result, “the site fails,” Mr. Nielsen said.
“It’s all about the basics,” said Baris Cetinok, Microsoft’s director of product management for Office Live, a site that offers free Web hosting and design tools for small businesses.
Visitors must immediately find out “who you are, what you do and how people can reach you,” Mr. Cetinok said.
Besides good grammar, Mr. Nielsen suggests that companies list a physical address, include a photograph of the building and not ask potential clients to fill out a form simply to ask a question. “That immediately communicates danger,” he said.
Making a site look good is complicated by the fact that no two monitors will necessarily present the Web in the same way. Users can set their browser’s default font size to be bigger or smaller, so it is impossible to know exactly how text will appear to any one person.
And how much of a Web site’s home page can actually be seen by users varies, based on the screen’s resolution.
The problems are made worse by designers being in Los Angeles or New York, and not, say, Texas, so “they think everyone has a large monitor and a fast D.S.L. connection,” said Neil Hettinger, co-owner of Lead Pencil Ad Design, a marketing and design company in Manhattan Beach, Calif. He suggests mixing text and graphics on a Web site, with dark type set against a light background for easy reading.
If you are selling a product, use thumbnail photos that can be enlarged when clicked on, Mr. Nielsen said, not a graphic that can be rotated in every direction. Otherwise “you see products at weird angles.”
“The most important rule in Web page design is to eliminate unnecessary design,” Mr. Flanders said. He recommends not adding large, spinning graphics that take a long time to download.
He also advises business owners not to add introductory splash pages that force a viewer to watch a video or animation.
“Splash pages are only needed for pornography, gambling and multinational Web sites that need to direct users to a particular country’s page,” Mr. Flanders said.
Graphics also do nothing to help a site get discovered by search engines like Google or Yahoo. Those sites troll the Internet for key words, as well as the frequency and quality of one site that links to another.
Text embedded in a graphic, like the name of a shop in a photograph, cannot be seen by search engines. And the old practice of embedding key words in white-on-white type will not increase a site’s page ranking; in fact it will do the opposite.
“The first time a word is used on a site, it’s significant,” said Matt Cutts, a Google software engineer. “If that word is used 50 times, there is a diminishing return.”
“If you put hidden tags on your page, you’re a total moron,” Mr. Flanders said. “You will get caught by search engines, or others will turn you in.”
If your business is local, make sure that the entire geographic area you serve is mentioned in text on the site. To increase the number of sites that link to yours, list your business in online trade directories, and mention it on various blogs.
Google offers free Web master tools that automatically analyze a site to determine if it is being optimized by search engines.
In the end, getting a prominent placement in a search engine is the only way to ensure that your site will be seen by those who can increase your business.
“If your site is not listed on the first page of search results, you might as well not exist,” Mr. Nielsen said.
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