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Top 5 Principles of Effective E-Commerce Website Designing

August 31, 2010 By manishchauhan Leave a Comment

Websites play an important role in E-Commerce business. As it is the only medium of interaction between the sellers and online shoppers, so it has to be carefully designed. E-Commerce websites are designed in order to accomplish the commercial needs. Internet surfers have become very smart and they can easily differentiate between good and poor website. In order to maximize the chances of success it’s very important during the design phase to carefully consider the following principles of effective E-Commerce website design.

1) User-Friendly Navigation: The navigation pattern in an E-Commerce website should be very simple and easy to understand. Since online shoppers cannot feel and touch the online store and its products. So, let your audience navigate through the website easily and you cater to their needs. Make use of breadcrumbs to make an enhanced and easy search process for the visitors.

2) Be Creative but Don’t Sound Absurd: Being creative is really good for designing an E-Commerce website. In order to get quality traffic, it is very necessary to make your website attractive and user-friendly. But it should not seem as if you are selling design and not the products. It should be designed in a way that all the common questions and objections are answered. Creativity is something which cannot be bought therefore, if you are really concerned about your E-Commerce web designing then, you can always hire dedicated web designers who provide professional website design services.

3) Security: You need to assure the shoppers that their private (contact and financial) details would not be shared to any third party. Security is an issue that is paramount to your customers. So, make sure your online payment processing is secure. Failure to do this would result lost customers, which in turn would lead loss in sales.

4) Instant Response: To make E-Commerce website more attractive, designers often make use of flash files and heavy HTML coding. Bigger flash files take more time to get loaded. Internet surfers are very impatient and need an instant response to their action. So, if the website or the images are taking too much of time to get loaded, the shoppers might get annoyed. Also, remember that an annoyed customer is a lost customer.

5) Quick Solution to Customer Queries: Customers might have some kind of queries in their mind while shopping online. Therefore, it is very important to provide customer service online that would actually resolve customer queries and help facilitating the online shopping.

All the above aspects help you to build a long term relationship with your customers and an excellence in all these will help you bring your customers back on your website.

About Author:
PixelCrayons is an industry leader in providing bespoke Ecommerce Web Design solutions. Here, you can hire dedicated Magento Designer and OsCommerce Designer on hourly basis.

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    Customizing Joomla! Web Templates

    August 30, 2010 By manishchauhan Leave a Comment

    Joomla! is an award winning open source content management system which comes with a default website design template. The navigation structure in the default template is very moderate and can be used in the websites for general purpose. Since, now even the big corporate houses, government sites and others have started using Joomla! as a professional platform to launch their websites customization using these templates and the other templates as well, have become frequent/ is quite often.

    Even Joomla! customization becomes necessary for the websites that have commercial value attached to them. Businesses using Joomla! as their e-shop or service platform where people can come and place orders or make purchases, customization becomes more obvious. Designing with proper call-to-action and navigation structure is a part of customization only. The next important thing you can work on is the look, feel and presentation of your website depending upon the nature and demography you tend to target.

    a) Custom Joomla! Templates

    Changing Joomla! templates is not at all difficult. A basic knowledge of Joomla! can help you in changing your desired design template. There are many galleries, blogs and website who offer free Joomla! design template and you can easily install them. But if you are looking for a high end customization then, you definitely require some professional support and help while installation so that you can be saved from the complexities attached. There are many online shops from where you can purchase some finely designed templates as per your requirement.

    b) Free Joomla! Templates

    Free Joomla! templates are available and can be downloaded for free but you may not find them completely suiting your requirement/s. As far as the customization goes, there is not much scope for professional support to help you get what you actually need. A free design template may bring the possibility to hamper the design of your website, store or community. So be sure while using a free design template.

    c) Paid Joomla! Templates

    Paid Joomla! Templates are tailored according to your requirement and can be customized to highest degree of your satisfaction. You get full professional support, installation, and look & feel matching to your desire/need.

    Things, which you should check while going for a paid Joomla! template:
    1: The template must have exactly the same look & feel as you have had dreamt of. It must match the theme of your store, community or website. It should have all the functionality exactly matching to your requirements.
    2: The template codes must be flexible enough to tweak to change. And an adjustment to the final layout should not be complex. The codes must be readable and editable.
    3: The design must have cross browser compatibility as one of its feature.

    Setting up a professional website using Joomla! as a CMS is as easy as getting a high quality and professional looking website design template.

    About Author:
    PixelCrayons is an industry leader in providing bespoke CMS Website Development solutions. Here, you can hire dedicated WordPress Developer, Drupal Developer and Joomla Developer on hourly basis.

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    Importance of PSD to HTML Formatting

    August 20, 2010 By manishchauhan Leave a Comment

    Website is like an asset to any online business. Every website is intended to achieve some pre-defined goals of the business and search engine optimization helps achieving them. Since the scope of Internet is unlimited and cannot be defined therefore, the task of tapping its full potential is near to impossible. It is very important to gain visibility on the major search engines and there are different ways to improve the same. As already mentioned, SEO is one of the way out where page and site formatting like PSD to HTML/CSS comes into play.

    The success of the websites lies in the volume of traffic it is carrying and the revenue it would generate. There are different parameters in Google algorithm and other search engines to rank a website. This includes— one way back links, speed of loading, marketing, on-page SEO and so on. Page formatting plays an important role in improving the ranking of a website.

    Why use formatting for increasing Traffic?

    It is quite important to convert different types of formats, like from PSD to XHTML, PSD to HTML and PSD to CSS. Many a times, it happens that designers make use of an automated tool for coding which actually defeats the purpose. Researches have revealed the fact that formatting the website is much easier than deploying latest, costly and time consuming SEO methods to increase the traffic. Keeping this in mind, web designers are now formatting websites so that the businesses gain from maximum visibility and content usability.

    How to Carry out Formatting?

    There is a need to avoid excess of non text formats like images, flashes etc. because these non text items reduce accessibility of the website. Search engine bots can easily look out for HTML coding. Therefore, simple websites which are coded in neat and clean manner rank higher than others. PSD to HTML conversion should be W3C standard compliant and cross browser compatible. Also, big images take a lot of time to load so they have to be optimized for easy and fast loading. Always add meta tags in the code. Search Engine always look for meta tags and they relate it with the objective of the website. These are some of the ways in which you can do formatting. The PSD to HTML conversion done should be hand coded and avoid the use of any automated software.

    Now a days, whether it is small or big business, they have their own websites. Web designers and web developers cater to the needs of different types of users and preferences across the globe. However, formatting of the site or pages calls for conversions such as PSD to HTML for optimum visibility.

    About Author:
    Xhtml.pixelcrayons.com converts your design files from various common image formats into best quality cross-browser compatible W3C validated XHTML/CSS markup. Visit PixelCrayons for our PSD to HTML, Design to HTML and PSD to WordPress services.

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    Some Important Tips to Consider before Starting an E-commerce Shop

    August 19, 2010 By manishchauhan Leave a Comment

    Profits from an E-commerce store do not start when you initiate selling on it but much before that. How?

    You imagine a single product which you want to buy and type the related keywords. You will find a long product list on your search engine page with some product specialized websites, review websites & blogs. And, the product is just a click away to purchase.

    Now consider the same in real world where one has to first setup a shop. But this establishment includes land cost, infrastructure cost, warehousing, expenditure in marketing & promotion of the products/service and other overheads. Whereas, setting up an E-commerce shop does not require scalable expenditure.

    Since the inception of Internet, many development and advancement of technologies have taken place. Some were normal and some revolutionary. And E-commerce is one such revolutionary development in the online arena which has made business just a click away.

    What adds to its achievement is that it provides convenience to both the parties—Consumer & Service Provider. A service provider or a product supplier can very easily ask for customer’s feedback, supervise its inventory, take care of its marketing & promotion and etc. On the other side, a consumer can compare products, review the products, write and give his rating to the purchase he/she has made, convenient tracking of the product shipment and many other such overwhelming features.

    The only thing which you need to have, before starting an E-commerce solution, is good platform with better design, and a little bit of planning. If you could not plan for E-commerce software, it would turn frustrating and time consuming. And many neglect this planning part and later pay for it by reinstalling new software.

    The other important thing which can assure you the correct establishment of your online shop is to hire a highly professional company which provides E-commerce Solution & software implementation as their expertise. Hiring a service provider ensures you the desired result and fully functional online shop.

    Once you get the right kind of vendor who can design and develop your store, fitted with desired features you are left with the marketing and promotion part of your store. Service providers with professionals as their work force do provide you help even with this and help the shop owner to gain momentum.

    So if you have decided to put an online shop then, a right E-commerce Solution providing company is a necessary step.

    About Author:
    PixelCrayons is an industry leader in providing bespoke Ecommerce Web Development solutions. Here, you can hire dedicated Magento Developer and OsCommerce Developer on hourly basis.

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    Avoid Software for PSD to HTML Conversion

    August 17, 2010 By manishchauhan Leave a Comment

    Everyone likes to get a cheap resource or a long lasting investment. People, many times, in order to get quick and cheap solution for their PSD to HTML requirement end up choosing an automated tool or a software over manual coding and get themselves in a trap.

    These software promises to provide error free code and generate HTML file same as the corresponding PSD but fail to produce it practically and leave the person in a dilemma of whether to go for a service provider and start the project from scratch or invest more time and clean the mess.

    There are many reasons which support the use of manual coding over the use of software or any tool which generates codes automatically. Below are some disadvantages of using auto plug-ins and software, which will provide you a clear picture why manual coding wins over automated coding:

    1- Bugs: Codes generated from some tool or software do not promise to be error free. You will find some bugs in the codes which will affect either the functionality of the website or change the design from the real PSD.

    2- Codes: Where clean code structure comes as a guarantee in manual coding automated coding does not promise to produce clean code structure. And most of the time you get sloppy codes in a very unprofessional manner.

    3- W3C Validation: Every service provider producing manual coding promise to generate W3C validated code whereas automated codes have high probability of failing W3C validation.

    4- Sacrificing quality: A quick turn around time is what one expects and gets from these tools but after sacrificing the quality of the codes. These tools very rarely produce quality codes and the customer has to get its design recoded. People who are looking just for quick turn around time and can take the risk of avoiding quality can surely bring these tools into their use.

    5- Lose Customer: With the help of these tools, one can surely impress the customer with meeting the deadline but will ultimately loose them when the customer looks at the quality.

    6- Fail Online Presence: If you are using an automated tool for converting your website design into HTML/XHTML then, you must be aware of the nature of codes. The codes produced by any software are not seo friendly and hence, damage all your SEO efforts.

    These are few of the reasons why one should avoid the use of automated tools and go for manual coding. If you are ready to risk your business just for the sale of saving few bucks then, you may use these tools as an option.

    About Author:
    Xhtml.pixelcrayons.com converts your design files from various common image formats into best quality cross-browser compatible W3C validated XHTML/CSS markup. Check xhtml.pixelcrayons.com for our PSD to CSS, Design to HTML and PSD to WordPress services.

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    WordPress- A Full Fledged Content Management System

    August 16, 2010 By manishchauhan Leave a Comment

    One Content Management platform which is used and liked by everyone is WordPress. Reasons being its easy to use features and functionality due to which it has acquired a huge user-base. Before WordPress 3.0, it was considered as the best blogging platform. But after the arrival of WordPress 3.0, the tag of ”best blogging platform and unfit for making fully-functional websites” is removed from WordPress. It has emerged as a boon to all non geeks in the world of web designing. Though there are many other free and paid CMS available in the market but using WordPress solutions can improve user’s online experience. We have enlisted few factors that why we should prefer to use WordPress than other CMS:

    1) It is completely free of cost. In the initial stages of business, cost cutting strategy looks pretty good, so using WordPress as CMS can really prove cost effective while getting your work done by the best of CMS. The money saved here, can be invested in other services like website design and development.

    2) It has an easy to use interface for which you don’t need to hire HTML programmers. Rather, it can be easily handled and managed by staff members of the organization. To work on this, you do not require knowledge of HTML or any other kind of coding.

    3) WP provides you with an extended scope of customization. You can customize settings according to your business needs. For instance, Scheduling Settings- With this, you can create and save content in advance and then can schedule it for publishing on any date. You don’t need to remember the date of publishing as the content will automatically get published on the scheduled date. Also it allows for privacy settings. This setting allows you to choose the extent to which you want to share information. Not just this, you can add media files like image, audio, video etc. in our post. Sometimes, it becomes an indispensable requirement to add these media files. In WordPress, it is very easy and quick to add multi-media files.

    4) WordPress provides users as well as search engine friendly URLs. Your WP website is likely to be ranked higher in search engines. Higher rankings in search results means higher traffic to the website. Higher traffic means more hits by your customers. More customers, means more revenue.

    5) WP is basically interactive in nature. Like visitors can post comments, provide feedback, participate in the community etc. This is an amazing and cool CMS which has a range of plugins and extensions which would do half of your job of managing the WP site/blog and makes you stress free.

    WordPress has proved to be a boon especially for the non-geeks. It has made the task of managing the websites very easy. But you need to be careful while hiring WordPress solutions provider. Discuss all your business requirements with them on the first place and then see if they can deliver you the same.

    About Author:
    PixelCrayons is an industry leader in providing bespoke CMS Website Design solutions. Here, you can hire dedicated WordPress Designer, Drupal Designer and Joomla Designer on hourly basis.

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