E-commerce
web site design
Visual
Elements of your e-commerce web site design
There
are some general guidelines you should follow when make a professional e-commerce
web site design. First of all let's take care of the visual elements.
Your web site should look very clean, visually appealing and unique to your
visitors. You should use white background with black text on it so that it
is very easy to read. If you don't want to use standard white-black theme,
try picking some good combination of background and text color that does
not hurt the eyes when you read it.
Regarding
the backgrounds, I always avoid and recommend you to avoid any background
textures that are used by many amateur web designers; they make it very hard
to read the text. However, using background images to stretch out 1pixel
images to add smooth borders, navigation bars, and other visual aspects,
can make your web site look very professional and will save a lot of loading
time.
Try
to stay with 3 or 4 colors when designing an e-commerce web site design,
if you throw in too many colors it will look very unprofessional and out
of theme. Another design flaw I noticed about some web sites is that they
use a logo that seems to completely stand out from the whole web site theme.
This is because some starting graphic designers try to make their logo look "very
cool" by applying as many special effects to it as possible, this is
not the way to go. A good logo must be simple, yet unique with about 2-3
colors, and it should match your web site colors for it to fit in..Now let's
consider some compatibility issues.
Testing
your web site on different browsers, platforms and resolutions
The
real challenge for a web site designer is to make his/her site look right,
no matter what kind of operational system, web browser, or resolution the
user is viewing it at. Yes, when making a business web site you should
at least consider testing it at different resolutions and web browsers,
that's a must. As a web designer you should have three different browsers
installed on your system: Internet Explorer, Netscape, and Opera, so you
can test your web site on every one of them. I also recommend getting different
versions of the web browsers. That doesn't mean you should get and test
your web site in Netscape 1.0. I test my web sites in Explorer 5.0 and
higher, Netscape 4.0 and higher, and the newest version of Opera.
I
make my web site compatible with 800X600 and higher resolutions. What I mean
by "compatible" is that the web site will fit on the screen in
800X600 and higher resolutions, lower resolutions will have to scroll to
the right a little bit. I recommend that you make your web sites compatible
with at least 800X600 resolutions as well, because that's what most web surfers
use today.
You
should also test your web sites on different platforms, Windows and Macintosh.
If you don't have different operating systems installed on your computer,
simply go to the nearest library or computer club where you think they have
a different one and test it there.
That's
all for making an e-commerce web site design for the visual
and testing part, if you want learn the process of designing a web site you
can read "best web site design" article.
There are a lot more steps involved when actually making and developing an e-commerce
web site which include: search engine optimization, affiliate marketing,
more traffic building strategies, php scripts, credit card acceptance and
more. All these articles are coming soon.
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