Ecommerce Website Design

Tips for effective navigation menus on ecommerce websites

Zach — Sun, 11 Dec 2011 23:41:39 +0000

A website’s navigation is an essential aspect of its design. An effective navigation allows users to quickly browse through a site’s content. They can easily locate the information they want. People are as impatient with website navigational systems as they are with page load times. If they cannot find the specific page they want immediately, then they will leave the site for another, which has more intuitive navigation.

Creating an effective navigation menu on ecommerce websites is simple, as long as developers are aware of the essential tools. Here are the key aspects of a well-designed website navigation system. There are two overriding principles, with several essential components.

Visible

A website’s navigation should always be visible. It should be easily located and available from almost anywhere on the page. To increase its visibility, many sites make the primary navigation visually attractive, with either images or flash buttons. These help the controls stand out on a page.

Consistent

The navigational system can be arranged in a variety of creative ways, but it should always be consistent. If the controls are on the top of the main page, they should be in the same place on all subpages. If the buttons are blue on one page, they should be blue on all the pages. If the buttons are medium-sized on one page, all the buttons should be equally sized. The navigation system can be unique, but it must be consistent in all aspects, on all pages. This helps users quickly identify the navigational buttons on a page.

Primary Navigation

The primary navigation for a site should be at the top of each page. It should be located above the fold. In consideration of the increasingly detailed screen resolutions and larger monitors being produced, this is generally regarded as the top 500 to 600 pixels on a webpage.

Being the primary navigation, this should be the most prominent navigation. These links often are either images with hyperlinks or flash buttons. Ideally, these are creatively designed and colorful.

As the primary navigation, this is not the secondary navigation. These links should be only to the main pages of a website. They should not link to any subpages, because additional links quickly clutter the screen. For many sites, the primary navigation ought to be limited to a company logo, Home, About, Services / Products, FAQ and Contact.

Footer Navigation

In addition to the primary navigation above the fold, every webpage should have text links at its footer. There are two reasons for this. First, some computers will not have Flash installed or will be unable to load the images. Text links at the bottom of a webpage allows users on these computers to still navigate around the site. Secondly, these links allow people the option of immediately going to another page, without scrolling to the top of the website. Like the primary navigation, these only need to be links to main pages.

Search

Any site that has a blog, forum or feed of some type should have a search feature. This allows users to find posts related to their interest quickly. Old posts will continue to be read if they are accessible through a search function.

For many sites, the search function is the weakest point of their navigational system. Often, search results are unrelated to the user’s interests. It is worth investing in a good search. Major engines, such as Google, have searches that can be placed on websites. After initial setup, a website’s search needs to be maintained by properly tagging pages.

Sitemap

For websites without a search, a sitemap can help users quickly locate the page they are interested in. A well-planned sitemap will be an html or php page that shows the relationship between pages and subpages in an outline format. Usually a link to the sitemap is located with the footer links.

In all of life, being lost is frustrating. Anytime users are lost on a website, they are bound to leave it for a more organized one. Using a prominently displayed and consistent navigation system, which consist of a primary navigation, footer navigation, search and sitemap, will allow users to enjoy the full potential of a website.

Tips for effective navigation menus on ecommerce websites

dan — Wed, 23 Nov 2011 03:12:13 +0000

Visible

Consistent

Primary Navigation

Being the primary navigation, this should be the most prominent navigation. These links often are either images with hyperlinks or flash buttons. Ideally, these are creatively designed and colorful.

Footer Navigation

Search

Sitemap

Getting traffic from deals websites

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2011 05:17:57 +0000

I’ve been part of the ecommerce website design space for a few years and back when I started things were certainly a lot easier than they are now. These days there is so much competition, all of the traditional ways of getting traffic (SEO, pay per click etc) have become incredibly expensive.

But that just means you need to be a bit more creative about how you go about getting traffic.

In this article, I will introduce a method I have used to great effect in generating tens of thousands of visitors to my deals website.

Deals websites

When I launched my deals site I managed to get just under 10,000 people visit the site in the first couple of days. the vast majority of this traffic came from putting a list on an Australian deals website. It was the number 1 deals site in the country and I managed to get to the front -age (the deal was a give-away).

Here are some of the statistics from the opening of the site.

9,500 visits (only 1,000 weren’t unique)
Over 300 email subscribers
About $1,000 in sales
Over 65 Facebook and Twitter likes / follows

How much did this cost?

Our launch costs were about $400, our giveaway was a very cheap item. Most of the giveaway costs were to do with postage.

The steps we took

The site was built to be relevant for people who love a good deal. We had only a handful of items, great prices, obvious discounts and lots of yellow!
The giveaway was listed on the deals website as a launch special.
The deal was good enough to get a lot of votes on the site and it raced to the top. Once it had enough to get off the ‘latest deals’ page and onto the homepage, the visits took off.

Inside 1 hour of the deal going up, we had received 150 orders for the item. We continued the same process a few times, giving away more and more so the deal stayed on the bargain site. We ended up giving away about 300.

The paid orders mainly came in throughout the next day or 2 not so much while the freebie deal was running. .

Conclusion

Traffic techniques like search engine optimisation and Adwords have always worked well but because of competition they are increasingly expensive. In this article I’ve presented a simple technique for getting huge amounts of traffic without anywhere near as much of an outlay. All it requires is a bit of thinking outside the square.

Setting up multiple ecommerce sites in Magento

admin — Fri, 08 Jul 2011 02:04:30 +0000

Hi all, Dan here from Web Development Brisbane, in this article I am going to give a quick overview of what Magento’s multiple stores features is all about.

One of the cool things about Magento is the ability to have a bunch of different ‘store fronts’ all powered by the one Magento installation. This is a really powerful feature, where previously you would have to set up multiple stand-alone installations of shopping carts on different domains, with Magento you can have as many stores as you want but only install and administer once from one location. No more maintenance issues with different sites, no more need for multiple hosting accounts etc.

Typically how it would be used is you would pick out products from a particular category and then register a domain just for that category. Then you can set up the multiple store in Magento and set the products from that category to display in both stores.

The really cool thing is this second store can be configured in it’s own unique way. All of the general Magento settings can either be inherited from the main store or you can choose to use customer ones for this new site. Where this is most powerful is the design section where you can have a completely different theme for the new site so it looks totally different. You can also obviously have different products, different prices, different checkout rules etc. But you can have the one central database of products, customers, orders etc.

And then you can set up as many more duplicate sites as you want. You just register the domain, install it as an add-on domain on your hosting account and configure Magento to use it for your store.

It’s powerful stuff and one of the reasons why Magento is growing so rapidly.

Payment gateways – eway vs PayPal

admin — Tue, 05 Jul 2011 01:40:47 +0000

My web design business has built a lot of ecommerce websites over the years and when starting each of them one of the first things we discuss with the client is how they are going to take money from the customer. 90% of the time you are going to be doing this for efficiency and you are going to want the whole process automated.

I have found that in most cases either Eway or PayPal or both are great options. In this post I’ll discuss both of these options to give you an idea of whether you want to use one of them or both of them.

2 gateway types

So first off it’s important to understand the main types of gateways.

The first type is a hosted gateway where the purchaser is taken off to the provider’s website to take payment. They don’t enter any credit card information into your website, they just confirm all of their purchases and are sent off to the provider’s site to do the transaction. This means you don’t have to be as concerned with security since you aren’t taking any of the sensitive details but it’s also a little bit more laborious for the customer.

PayPal is a hosted service so the customer comes to your site, completes the order then goes off to PayPal to pay for it and is re-directed back to your site for confirmation. Typically there are a few more clicks involved in this process.

The second type is an integrated gateway where customers enter their details directly on your site and it is all processed live on your site (by communicating seamlessly with the external gateway).

The purchaser doesn’t leave your site and doesn’t necessarily need to know what is going on behind the scenes. The gateway will pass back information instantaneously in relation to the purchase (i.e. credit card rejected, purchase approved etc) and those messages are displayed on your website.

Eway is an integrated gateway and works in this way in that the transaction is handled seamlessly on your sites.

Where is the money going

The other big difference between PayPal and Eway is with Eway the money goes directly into your bank account. With PayPal the money goes into your PayPal account from where you can transfer it into your bank account (which takes time). I have also found that most accounting systems struggle with this and it seems to create an extra accounting burden whether that be extra bookkeeping (MYOB) or confused data feeds (Xero).

Why use Eway

So with that in mind, here are my main reasons for using eway.

It’s a more seamless experience for the customer.
The money goes directly into your account for easy accounting.
Their live chat support is the best in the business.

Why use PayPal

Because almost everyone has a PayPal account and people can purchase with their account without entering data every time they purchase.
It’s fees are considerably lower.
There is no extra security required on your website.
It’s very easy to setup and pretty much every shopping cart software will run it.

Why use both

No doubt offering more payment options will result in a small increase in buyers. Depending on your budget and the size of your implementation this could be a big increase overall.

Conclusion

I hope you have found this useful, please feel free to comment if you have any feedback on the article. We generally recommend that people start with PayPal because it’s so cheap, easy and universal but over time as the site grows it could be useful to also look at an integrated gateway like Eway.

About the author: Dan Norris

Dan Norris is the owner of A Website Designer, one of Australia’s leading small business web design blogs and founder of Web Circle, a progressive Gold Coast web design agency with a relentless drive to help small business owners connect with real customer online. He also runs ecommerce website design, a blog just for ecommerce topics.

Ecommerce topics on my main blog

admin — Mon, 20 Jun 2011 10:58:59 +0000

Rather than duplicate everything on this site I thought I’d post a link to the ecommerce section of my main blog which you can find here.

Some of the ecommerce related posts I have put up in the past include: