Ecommerce

Is Your site doing what you planned it to do…

There are so many web design companies out there these days that offer you “The Best Sites and Prices” or so they say!

Any company will tell you that they can offer you the best site that suites your need. But the reality of it is that unless you are involved with the design and production of your site it will not be everything you expected it to be.

When you choose a design company you need to arrange meetings to discuss the Site here is a list of some things to consider.

• What You Want To Sell
• Navigation
• Design
• Prices (I will go in to more detail about this later on)
• SEO (Search engine optimisation)
• Time

Now I will go in to more detail of the list above….

What you want to sell:

Only you know your customer’s needs!

As the owner of the company with years of experience and the experience of the products that you want to offer only you know what your customers want.

Before consulting a Web Design Company you need to generate a list of items that you intend to sell on the website.

Split the list in to main and sub-categories depending on the amount of products that you are selling. A main category for a Motorbike Company could be “Motorcycle Gloves” and possible sub-categories could be Brand Names, Sizes and Colours etc…

Once this is done the next step is….

Navigation

This is normally spilt in to two different types:

Top Bar Navigation

This is an example of a simple Top Navigation Bar, Next will be a side navigation

Navigation Bar

These are the two most commonly use side navigation Bars used in Web Design. Navigation Bars are one of the Features that you need to talk about in a meeting with a Web Design company try to offer the easiest navigation for your potential customers(To many people are put of a site due to bad Navigation)

Design

Right now we get on to the design of the site, One of the key features of a website is having an attractive site (Don’t use Flash, This will be explained later) that catches the customers attention. Example of a good design that is warm and welcoming can be found here: http://www.tsgcreative.co.uk/website-design/default.aspx

Talk about the different colours that you want on you site most web designers suggest having Three Main colours on your website, also make sure that the colours that you choose are user friendly no one likes loads and loads of Bright colours. The main use of bright colours in web design is to get the users attention drawing them over to a specific item or part of the site. Used in small chunks it can fool people in to thinking that the specific point of the site or Item is more important than others.

Now for the big one!!!

Price!

Too many people spend too little or in some cases even too much on a bad site. “You Get What You Pay For” is or should be one of the most commonly known facts of life. You could spend anything up to £10,000 on a really good site that does nothing and £360 on a small site that does everything you need. One of the best quotes that explain this: “A lot of people come to us thinking they want a haircut but actually they want a shower. Don’t tell us what you need. We’ll tell you what you need. And we’ll probably save you money whilst we’re doing it”

The Web Design Company will tell you what you need in your site and additional features that you could include for extra cost. A good Web Design Company will not sell you features that you don’t need.

Time

Everyone wants there new site as fast as possible but that is one of the disappointing points of a new site is the time it takes to create.

A good site can take some time to build and at the end it is worth the wait.

Time is a very easy topic to address, when having meetings the Web Design Company will look at your needs and give you a rough estimate of how long your site will take but don’t be mad if it takes longer.

There are so many reasons why a website can go past the expected time it takes go live. One of the most important things to keep in mind is that even if it takes an extra two months for the site to be usable to the public it is better than having no site at all or having a bad site that has many faults.

The Extra bit…

SEO (Search Engine Optimisation)

I decided to save this till the end as it links well with the Development of a site, Future development getting you site known to the public and the Web.

SEO is a massive topic to go in to so I will try and keep this brief.

SEO helps your website to be found on search engines and people that want to find products that relate to your site. A lot of sites have no SEO implemented on their Web Site, and these are the sites that you will never see unless you know the company it will be hard to find them.

To read more about SEO here:  http://www.quickwebquote.com/web-site-seo/