Creating an Effective E-commerce Web Site
An effective e-commerce web site is one that helps you meet your business goals.
Creating a beautiful web site is difficult. It requires graphic design talent, a clear understanding of the technology available and search engine registration techniques, and knowledge about the way a user browses a site. However, most web designers are happy if they can achieve the single purpose of making a site “attractive” to the paying customer let alone the user. This is the major difference between a graphic artist that designs web sites and a professional web site designer.
A professional web site designer understands that there is more to designing a web site than a good looking graphic design. A good web site design must:
- Present a professional image (the design part)
- Provide a logical structure that allows easy navigation
- Be effective
- Provide the infrastructure necessary for search engines to do their job
It’s easy to see why a professional web designer is almost required to have multiple personalities to be good at their job. They have to be creative, artistic, visual, logical, technical, factual, analytical, organized, detailed, expressive, emotional, supportive, reliable, realistic, and process driven. Just finding a creative and artistic person that can also be analytical is difficult. (This has to be the perfect job for Sybil?)
The point is, if you want to build an effective web site you have to look at more than the graphic design. You have to take into account multiple purposes for each individual section of the site. Your must then design each individual web page from the ground up to meet those multiple purposes.
When you are designing (or re-designing) a web site the professional web developer begins with these questions.
- What is the purpose of the site?
- What do you want it to accomplish?
You should also hear suggestions on what the site should do, what actions you may want to encourage the user to take and possible ways to measure the success and how to track those measures. After all, how do you know your site is improving if you don’t know what it’s supposed to accomplish and how to measure it? If you are working with a professional web developer, this will be at the top of their list of subjects to discuss prior to doing any design work.
Once a basic purpose (mission) for the site is defined, the actual design can begin.
There are two primary considerations to site design. The first is image. What image do you want the site to present? Graphic design, page layout, color and typeface choice are important to presenting the image you want. Loud or primary colors may be great for a teen site but doesn’t fit well for a professional service.
The second consideration is content. This has to be closely tied to the basic “purpose” of the site. Your web site should focus on providing all content that clearly supports the “purpose” of the site in a way that makes it easy for the user to tie the information together. Secondary and supporting content can be “further” away from the main navigation.
The graphic design is the easiest part of web site design to evaluate. It requires little technical expertise. Most of us can tell a professional design from a non-professional one with little training. But it takes more than being able to recognize a professional design to create one.
- Are the graphics clean and well balanced?
- Do the colors match?
- Is the typeface consistent?
- Is the layout pleasing to the eye?
- Does the overall look of the design appear professional?
- Is the primary content no more than one click away from the home page?
Providing a structure that makes it easy for site users to find what they are looking for is extremely important to site success. This requires technical expertise and, preferably, loads of experience building and surfing web sites. If you are an experienced web surfer, you know the kinds of things that make you crazy.
- Is the contact information easy to find?
- Is the privacy statement easy to understand? (Do they quickly say what they will do with any information you give them?)
- Is it easy to navigate to different sections of the site and back to the home page?
- Are the links logically organized?
- If there is a “Search” option, does it return anything remotely focused on what you were searching for?
- Are the site sections easily recognized? (Can you tell which section you are in?)
- Is the location of the navigation buttons/links consistent from page to page and section to section?
Simply put, if the navigation structure is not intuitive, it is worthless to the user.
To accomplish the goal or purpose of the page or section you must first have a clear definition of the goal or purpose and it must be measurable. This does not mean that you can define the contact page as “Let’s people know how to contact us”. The purpose of any page should include the action(s) you want the user to take on the page. A contacts page under this definition may have a purpose of providing the most effective contact for all situations. It should also include clear instructions on what contact information to use for specific customer needs and how to use the information; Call, email, postal, etc., and a way to measure the success of the page. In this example the measure may be the monthly total percentage of “correct contacts” (number of calls/messages to the correct contact as a percentage of total number of calls/messages to all contacts) Here are just a few of the questions you need to ask.
- Does the section have a clear purpose?
- Is the purpose clearly stated or otherwise defined for the site user?
- Is the purpose measurable and, if so, how will it be measured?
You may decide that some sections of your site do not require an ongoing measure. In this case you should consider implementing a measure for a few months before and after a change to the section to see if the change actually improved the effectiveness of that section.
Providing the infrastructure necessary for search engines to correctly classify your site and to have your site show up well in keyword search results is the most technical aspect of designing your web site. People may understand the emotional and logical purpose of an image. Search engines, however, work solely on words. If your page is nothing but images, flash, multimedia or other non-language based design you will have a difficult time receiving top search engine position for a particular key phrase simply because there are no words in your page for the search engine to read. Some designers apply header (meta) tags to these multimedia pages without understanding that only a few search engines (and none of the most popular) read meta tags other than the title tag.
Here are some of the basic requirements for search engine placement.
- Unique titles, meta tags, headlines, image alternative text, at least three body copy paragraphs on every single page of the site.
- Highly focused keyword phrases in the titles and body copy of the page.
- No more than 5 focused keyword phrases per page.
- At least one navigation scheme based on text links.
- A call-to-action on every page.
When each web page in your site includes the four primary functions, it is easy to see why the cost of developing your site may be higher. It should also be clear that the value of your site to your business increases dramatically when it is properly designed. Unfortunately, web site designers that focus solely on the graphic design or technology of a site are far more abundant than web site developers who focus on all of the aspects of a professional web site design.
Remember, in web site design world, multiple personalities are a good thing… if your goal is maximum site effectiveness. Embrace each primary function and the value of your web site will increase to you and your customers.
Creating the web site budget
How do you decide how much to spend on a web site?
Most people look at their web site as a cost center. The question is “How much will it cost me to develop and run the site?” The appropriate question is “What is the value of the web site?”
If you web site is a cost center you are wasting your money and should consider not having a web site. On the other hand, if the site has a value wouldn’t you like to know what it is? Let’s look at why the second question is always more appropriate.
Defining Purpose:
The usual site purpose: To make our product information available on the web.
Refined “value” purpose: To reduce the cost of distributing product information and increase sales.
The first purpose defines a cost center. If tempts you to look at the cost of the web site as a liability. The second purpose defines a profit center. It tempts you to look at the site as a way to save money; to add to the bottom line.
The value of this site is fairly easy to figure. As an example, you have four full color brochures and a 12 page full color catalog. Each of the brochures cost you fifty cents each to print and each 12 page catalog costs you two dollars to print. In addition it costs $2.50 each for the labor and postage to ship to the prospect. The total cost for each brochure is $3.00 and $4.50 for each catalog.
By checking your site statistics you find that 1000 people looked at each of the four brochures and 1250 people looked at the catalog information in May. The math is simple.
4 brochures times $3.00 time 1000 visitors = $12,000.00
1 catalog times $4.50 times 1250 visitors = $5625.00
Total savings for May = $17,625.00
“But”, you say, “I never get that many requests for brochures or catalogs.”
That’s true. You have never received that many requests in a year for your catalog or brochures. So the question is, “What is the value of having 12 times as many people see your brochure and catalog?” It is probable that the people who view your brochure online are statistically less likely to purchase from you than people who request your brochure and catalog by phone or mail. This forces us to look further.
Let’s say that people who actually request a physical brochure or catalog is 10 times more likely to order from you. If so, we can extrapolate that the “actual value” of the online views is just 10% of brochure and catalog requests.
Total savings for May = $17,625.00 time 10% = $1,762.50
However, if we find that only 1 in 1000 of the people who view the online brochure and catalog actually place an order we have to add the value of those orders to our site value.
For instance:
5250 online viewers divided by 1000 = 5.25 purchase times the average purchase price
In this example, a web site costing $5,000.00 is a bargain. It would pay for it’s self in just 4 months… the value of the web site far outweighs the cost of the site. This, however, is only true if you have visitors to the site. With fewer visitors, the value is much lower. With more visitors, the value would be much higher.
All marketing is a numbers game. You market to a market segment of thousands. Hundreds become interested prospects. Dozens become customers. The actual numbers vary from business to business and marketing technique to marketing technique but the concept is the same. The purpose of your marketing (and your web site) is to turn as many of the marketing segment into customers as possible.
This is why clearly defining the purpose of your site and creating measures to track the “value” of the site is so important. Your goals are to turn visitors into interested prospects and interested prospects into customers. Your site design, purpose and all “calls-to-action” should be targeted specifically to achieve those goals.
Creating a “budget” for your web site should be focused on the “value” of your web site. This forces you to look at defining the purpose of the site and keeps you and your web site designer focused on what you want to accomplish rather than what is “artistically pleasing”. It helps you focus the design of the site on sound business principals, which in the long run, will add to your bottom line rather than subtracting from it.
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