| Six Tips to Enhance your Website |
This edition’s feature article details a project plan for establishing your own e-commerce site.
However, many of our clients already have a functional site. Once you have your site up and running,
your work is far from done. To keep customers coming back to your Internet bead/ jewelry business
you must have a website they find easy to use and enjoyable. Below, we have outlined several tips
to make your site competitive with the many others in the market. Don’t get left behind!
- Search function
Your website may be small or large, simple or complex. Regardless, visitors should have the ability to search
through your pages and products to find what they need. The faster a visitor can find what they need, the happier
they will be and the more times they will visit your website.
- Minimize scrolling (Above the Fold Rule)
Like a newspaper, the fold is the point in which the visitor has to start scrolling down (or to the side) to view
the rest of the page. The more content you can have above the fold, the more likely the visitor will see it.
Before you start cramming content above the fold, prioritize what content is most important and work your way down.
The location of the fold varies depending on the visitor's screen resolution. A rule of thumb is to design web pages
for an 800x600 resolution. Ask your web developer to design within these constraints.
- Quality images of your products
If visitors are to become customers, they need to see your product. The more realistic and clear you can make the
images, the better. Some jewelry components are shiny or detailed. Do your best to "blow up" the image so a visitor
can see the intricacies of the product. Information about the product is great, but seeing it makes it that much more
tangible and desirable.
- Always have fresh material to make your website "sticky"
A sticky website is a website with repeat visitors. The more often people come to your site, the more opportunities
you have to make a sale. The best way to make a sticky website is to periodically cycle your content with new material.
New material does not have to be drastic. Feature a different sale item each month or announce product price updates
on your main page.
- Limit text blocks
Reading text on a web page is much harder to do than reading a paper in hand. People read large text blocks slowly,
and are less likely to absorb the content. Keep the text as concise as possible. If the content is long, break it
up with line breaks, images, or even distribute it among multiple pages.
- Key design principles – Fonts & Colors, Images, Page Layouts
The Internet can provide a multitude of fonts, colors, images, and multimedia. However, these gifts should be used
sparingly. To maintain a consistent, appealing website, try limiting fonts to a select few. Colors can be helpful
or detrimental. Watch your text and page color combinations to ensure that words are easy to read without causing
eye strain. For example, blue text on a white background is okay, while purple on black is not desirable. Images are
a great way to spice up a web page; however, the images should be relevant to the content of the page or the site as
a whole. Animated images can distract the visitor, so use those with great selectiveness if at all. A good website
is a predictable website. Web pages should have layouts that are fairly conventional. Visitors are interested in
content, not new layouts. Stick with what works.
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