An ecommerce web site acts as a store front for window shoppers, aka your browsers. The web design of your ecommerce site is therefore of utmost importance to ensure quality customer conversions. Design your website to gently lead your client through the learning and sales process. Proper text spelling is very important. Place a lot of textual content around your site to provide for the search engine spiders and to keep your visitors accurately informed.

Abandoned shopping carts are a common ecommerce merchant nightmare. In all probability there are a couple of not so finely tuned issues causing this problem.

Many times a site will request personal information before completing a purchase. Filling out pages of information may deter people from finishing up and they may opt to leave the site altogether. Be sure that your shipping costs are clearly displayed. Customers like to to see the charges set out for them. Many times customers who can't locate the shipping fees easily may abandon the whole buying process and leave to find alternative options.

Having a slow loading shopping cart is a recipe for disaster. It is important that your shopping cart loads quickly and that any changes made to merchandise in the cart are done quickly too. If a customer is trying to add an item to their cart and your page is taking a long time to load, they may just decide to skip the purchase. make sure to insert an option for payment other than the US dollar to smooth out the process for your international customers.

Discount code features should be placed in easily recognized locations near the shopping cart. It's best if the discount will immediately register on the total because human nature is to like saving money!

Many a frustrated customer will spend time shopping around a site without completing a purchase and return an hour later to find their shopping cart empty! It is worthwhile to implement a reasonable amount of time that the merchandise will remain in the shopping carts for customers to resume their shopping and complete their purchases. Because with the busy lives we lead today it is very likely that people won't finish their ordering in one sitting. Of course we'd all rather customers who shop and purchase in one sitting but since there are occasions n which this won't happen its best to be optimally prepared to assist our customers in every way.

Before you start sending traffic to your site complete a thorough usability test of your shopping cart. This can be accomplished by having a couple of people mock shop and complete a purchase. Observe them as they navigate through all the steps without assisting them in any way. Give them a discount code to enter and see how smoothly the totals change. This way you can check if there are any bumps in the process that need to be smoothed out before you turn your visitors into frustrated browsers. By creating a a pleasant shopping cart experience you will be sure of happier and more satisfied customers.

Gone are the days when Internet access referred to a clunky computer monitor and screen. Many people now access the Internet via smart phone, Blackberrys or even regular cell phones. Because of this growing practice website designers and developers need to focus on mobile format websites too. But no need to get nervous about having to learn new software and programs, there are a couple of online services available to help you create or convert websites into mobile format.

Google's Conversion Utility's name speaks for itself. A simple program that just needs your website URL and an indication to include images or not, select the 'Go' button and your website is successfully converted to mobile format. Regardless of the fact that it's not so publicized, it's a great program.

The Mobify program is just as it sounds. Mobile modification. This is a web service that uses DeviceAtlas, the leading mobile device database, to provides an efficient way to convert a site for mobile access. Many web designers and bloggers find Mobify a wonderful program for designing visually engaging and easy to use mobile layouts for their existing websites.

Skweezer.com is another user friendly site for mobile conversions. Enter your site URL and it will display your website in its mobile friendly version. It removes any large images, CSS styles and their elements that will not display properly once converted.

MoFuse and Winksite are two really neat programs that have the ability to detect a visiting mobile user . They will then send them over your site's mobile version!

As always when designing a website, it is important to keep things simple, how much more so when assigning styles for mobile devices. Because they in general work slower than computers you want to avoid anything that will slow it down more, like large images or weighty pages. It's also a good idea to scale page elements by screen size rather than fixed pixel widths because handheld mobile devices vary in their own screen sizes and resolutions. You want your page to look top notch no matter on which screen at what time!

To frame or not to frame, that is the question. It may be tempting to use frames in your website design because you may want a clear and clean look throughout your site, like headers, footers, menu bars, etc and frames make these easy to implement. Many users also find framed sites easy to navigate around and to find information. yet many times the disadvantages associated with frames render the whole idea not worth it. If someone specifically wants to use frames they will have to create duplicate pages though with no frame-sets to accommodate browsers who don't support frames and are therefore incompatible to pages with this framework. Additionally many search engines have difficulty ranking framed pages which may result in low ranking for your site for no good reason, other than the fact that you designed your site with frames! When everyone is working so hard to better their SEO why use the number one thing that is known to hinder the spiders?

The fact that the address bar doesn't change from page to page makes it impossible for anyone to bookmark or share a link to a specific page on your site. This means that any time someone wants to return a to a specific page he would need to start searching through your whole site. Secondly, when a page from your site other than the frame-set shows up in search engine results , the visitor conducting the search will just see the sub-page without the surrounding frame. A framed site may also prevent the 'back' button on a screen from working properly. A disabled user employing the use of a screen reader may also find it difficult to navigate around such a site.

There are ways to combat these problems but the clunky javascript designed to help defeats the purpose of the frames in the first place! Instead of having your easy to use frames you are forced to play around with the javascript to combat its problems! in reality The preferred way of having the same elements on a page throughout a site is to use server-side includes. server side includes, or SSI, allow you to construct separate pages for inclusion in another 'main' page. SSI can be very effective when used together with tables. many times you may find one section of a page that you would like to appear on each page of your site. though it may seem ideal to frame it, you can achieve the same effect by using an SSI callout in a table cell within a page, and none of the problems associated with frames arise! So though frames may have their uses, it does seem fair to say that many strongly advise keeping your distance from this website format.

Many a frustrated website developer wonders what makes browsers lose interest in his site quickly. There may be a couple of causes to this problem. Here we will touch on a few.

Stop and look over the pages on your site. Does each page have something valuable to offer its visitors? Presentation of a page won't matter if there is no valuable content on it for the reader. Your visitor is browsing your site for a reason. Try to fulfill those reasons before spending time dreaming up successful designs. You need to have the basic content in place first. This will give your visitors reason to continue browsing through the rest of your site.

In addition, many sites try to make money by posting advertisements for other businesses in their sites. How many of us would bother turning on the TV if it were just commercials? In the same vein, a site developer needs to ensure that the advertisements don't take over the whole page and that there is more content than ads available. Try for a 25/75 ratio, 25% ads to a 75% site content.

Many websites use pop-ups to relay messages to their visitors. If you look from the perspective of a visitor, pop-ups are annoying and distracting, hindering attempts to complete conversion or acquire information. There are many creative ways to get messages across other than springing them in them face of the screen reader. Many times a frustrated reader will just click off a pop-up filled site without finishing his task, vowing to get what he needs from another pop-up free site.

An organized site breeds happy consumers. Ensure that your site is easily navigable and that your content is organized neatly. Besides for a generally more attractive interface, browsers will find their way around and be able to successfully accomplish what they need to on your site. This is at least as important as the overall web design of your site!

Including a menu bar and a way to return HOME on each page. The HOME icon will allow for a lost visitor to redirect himself easily. Posting a menu bar is helpful so that visitors can find their way around without having to return HOME each time they want to reread the menu or available options.

This is but a tip of the iceberg of the many ideas available to keep your browsers loyal and returning. Most of them are applicable in some way to all sites. The great thing about them is that they generally don't call for major site renovations, just a bit of tweaking here and there.

The newest trend in the world of web design is paper design. Paper design is just as it sounds, using the good old-fashioned paper and cardboard look for your website design. This lends a warmer more personal touch to a generally colder computer look. its a fun and creative way to personalize your website and add in a bit of personality.

Some sites may opt to use the notebook paper look. Its definitely a very different look than the traditional computer screen we are used to viewing. Adding in text 'written' in pencil scrawl or precise inked words is a wonderful complement to this innovative idea.

Others may try out the layered scrapbook look. This will usually involve a combination of colors or contrasts displayed in a more haphazard though eye catching way. This concept is wonderful For Camps or extra curricular programs building a website who are looking to successfully transmit over the fun they want to advertise. Browsers generally find a page with a bit more personality to be more compelling to look into further.

The clipboard or spiral look is another interesting idea. This basically involves an image of a clipboard or spirals of a notebook and the main theme of your site displayed on the 'paper' attached to the clipboard. It lends a bit of informality and camaraderie between the website designers and the site visitors. The actual design of the website has an effect on the [future] relationship between developers and customers!

Posting images, graphics, or pictures, in the Polaroid camera look is another twist on the usual ideas. For a business that wants to advertise their services, for example a paint company or mold removal service that would like to display 'before' and 'after' pictures promoting how wonderful their services are, this is a fantastic option. The real life pictures are a wonderful way to show your browsers the miracles you can perform. the space underneath the picture allows you to 'pencil' in any comments you would like, for example, 'before and after' or '3 days after and two months after,' etc. there are numerous possibilities available.

Understandably I only covered a couple of ideas because ultimately your creativity and feelings are what will shine through on the site you design. Using paper inspired design is a wonderful way to blend the physical world with the world of computers.

One of the most important facets to site optimization is optimizing your images. Images greatly enhance a site by making it more exciting and attractive to browsers. Problems can arise though because high quality images can greatly increase a page's loading time. The trick is to optimize your images so that they remain great in quality yet small in file size. In addition, image optimization is very important in SEO . There are many wonderful Internet tools available to help you best optimize your images.

Smush.it is a program dealing specifically with image formats. With its optimization techniques it removes all unnecessary bytes from your image files and improves performance. A big advantage is that it won't alter the visual quality of your image during its cleansing process. Smush.it can run through five website images at the same time! You can expect up to a twenty percent reduction of site size after 'smushing' the images on your pages.

SiteReprtCard Image optimization Tool is a free utility that is able to compress any GIF, JPG,and PNG image. Its easy to use this program. Just copy and paste your image's URL into the blank space or upload your picture onto the program and the SiteReportCard will consolidate your image into a given size or quality.

RIOT which is an abbreviation for Radical Image Optimization Tool is unique in the sense that it can optimize images with uncommon extensions. The tool is able to optimize different image formats by reading its magic number. It's a fast processing tool so you have instant results. It uses well known re-sample filters like Lanczos3, Bicubic, and others. Many people like using this tool because both the revised image and the original are displayed side by side to easily compare quality. The resulting image is a cleaner user interface.

The JPEG cleaner is a simple yet powerful implement useful for ridding JPG files from anything that is not picture data. Many popular graphics programs such as Adobe, have been writing additional heavy information into the JPG files that isn't necessary for the proper display of the image. It just makes the image much larger and slow-loading and it's not enhancing the quality at all. This tool will successfully dispose of that unnecessary information leaving your beautiful high quality image a much smaller file size.

There are numerous other tools available for you to try out on the various images in your site. You're the best judge when it comes to this. No matter what too other people vote on, you will see for yourself which tool is the very best for YOUR site optimization.

In order to properly design a web page that will attract visitors to your site, you need to create a site that is pleasant and eye appealing. There are many softwares and tools available to assist you in designing a successful website. The Adobe softwares are highly recommended to use. Based out of San Jose, California, the Adobe software company was created way back in the 1980s. Since its inception, Adobe has primarily has focused on the creation of multimedia and creative software products and recently it has branched out into developing rich Internet applications softwares. There are a couple of cool Adobe programs easily available to enhance the creation of your web site.

The best website development tool available now is the Adobe Dreamweaver CS4 (Creative Suite). It is a rapid application tool used for designing professional websites. This device also generates the HTML codes for you so you don need to be an expert in HTML programming to successfully develop a website! Dreamweaver also comes with other exciting functions such as rollovers, templates, CSS, and a lot more!

Heading into the designing factor of websites, Adobe Photoshop CS4 is highly acclaimed. Photoshop is great for designing layouts and playing around with images. It can easily optimize and export your images in the gif or jpeg modes. Customizing image sizes and colors, implementing contrasts and cool effects are easily accomplished via Photoshop's multitude of neat applications. Once you get the hang of the program its fun to use and easy to deal with.

Some websites use animations to further enhance their web design. Adobe Flash is a fantastic animation software. One reason that Flash is so popular, is because you can create incredible animations in small files so it doesn't increase the loading time of your page. This ensures that your customers don't leave your site before it opens out of frustration for the time consuming process. In addition there are plenty of helpful tips and tutorials about how to successfully set up Flash, readily available on the good old World Wide Web.

Using all these programs together or even just one or two of them is sure to create you the site of your dreams. Having a professional web designer design your site when you first set it up is a great idea too until you get your site up and running and really get the hang of how to use all the available applications. Let your creativity shine forth in the creation of your site!

More and more government agencies are making it a law to cater to all audiences. As a marketer, this applies too. You need to create a website accessible to all users. The goal in accessibility is to make the website content readable and comprehendible to all readers, regardless of ability. It's important to consider the possible physical disabilities of a visitor. Nowadays there is an astonishing number of people with disabilities. Many of these disabilities don't affect website browsing in the least, say a paraplegic or foot amputee. The most common disabilities that would affect website accessibility are visual and hearing impairments. Approximately between seven to twenty percent of the US population fall into this category. (Of course the numbers climb with age.) Accessibility is about access. Likened to installing a ramp alongside the stairs leading into your office building or adding Braille lettering to the signs for the restrooms, it's a courtesy to help those with disabilities maneuver through every day life as easy as possible.

Accessibility is equally as important as any other facet in your website's design . All web developers need to keep in mind that people with visual impairments or who have difficulty grasping a mouse will most probably be among their site's visitors and they need to build their site accordingly. A screen reader is a technological advancement that reads out written text on the screen for the users who can't read for themselves. Creating an image-heavy site in this case isn't so conducive for the screen reader to properly convey your content. A screen reader is able to pull out all links from a page. It has the ability to scan a site to determine what it's about too. It's generally a good idea to include some links at the top of your page that give users the opportunity to skip right over to the main content or navigation of your site. This is referred to as 'Skip Links".

Another common phenomena are people who have difficulty with small fonts or contrasts that are not clearly defined, or even colorblind users. Many times they will employ the assistance of a screen magnifier which magnifies the text and images on the screen. When constructing your website make sure that the images will remain clear and complete even when zoomed in on. Instituting scalable fonts on your site are also a big plus. Many web pages sport combinations of background and foreground colors that cause extreme difficulty for colorblind users to decipher the content. There are a bunch of creative techniques available to implement into your site to make it easier for those who have difficulty, like features that will change the colors or define the contrasts on the page.

With regard to auditory impairments, most times the usability of a site remains the same with the sound turned off. However with the trends veering more towards multimedia, it may become a bigger issue. A way to help the situation may be to place subtitles on the video clip ( which will benefit foreign viewers too). In general, anything with sound that is important for the content of your site should be transcripted to enable those with hearing difficulties, equal comprehension.

The great thing about accessibility is that it is universally appreciated! Even for people who have no impairments, it's a major help. Accessibility ensures that viewers using a cellphone, laptop or any other medium, see the content and images displayed clearly and derive the effect that you were looking to create!

A website is like a road system. There are paths, trails, and highways leading off in all directions. Its quite easy for a visitor to get lost and confused when exploring your site. To combat this, it's important to implement good website navigation in the web design, acting as a road map in the web of passages.

The first thing to do is to set up a home base. The home page should act as the epicenter for all site traffic to start out from. It should state clearly what options your site offers and have clear directions how to get to them.

There are a couple of different formats of navigation. A hierarchical site is a rich, informative site that is best organized as a large tree, similar to a library. Many hierarchical sites use the "bread crumb trail" approach which means that as the reader proceeds from page to page, going further and further into a specific topic, the page will inform you what steps took you there and how to return to the original place. This is ideal when trying to organize large amounts of information.

A global approach is one where the site's information is presented in a few broad categories, and the navigation here would allow easy cross traffic. It is best if its easy for the reader to easily skim through all points on the site.

Local navigation is somewhere in between the above mentioned. An approach like this would apply when there is deep information found within broader areas. Local focuses on a specific area of the site as opposed to global which is more all site inclusive.

A navigation bar lists the top level categories that a site boasts. The main concern with a navigation bar is that it takes up space that could otherwise be used for content. But it is important to ensure that your readers are focused and confident when browsing your site. You can place the your navigation bar wherever you like on your screen. Most sites set it up on the left side of the screen though some place it on the right too. Placing the bar at the top of the page has the advantage that it stays out of the way, though if its too big you may risk it blocking your readers from important content when they first reach your page. Since the navigation appears on every page, take care that it doesn't come to distract or annoy your visitor by taking up too much space. Your navigation bar should appear the same on each page to better familiarize people with your site and how it works.

Styles of navigation vary. The most basic form is embedded links, where text is linked within the body of the page. This is wonderful in areas where one wants to supplement a topic with information found anywhere on the web, though its not so efficient for attracting new browsers. Tab navigation is used when breaking into a few primary categories. Similar to the way one would arrange a binder, the website navigation links appear as tabs organizing the site into sections. A site map or table of contents is a commonly used technique because it provides your visitor with a one stop location to reach anything on your site. Its usually a page listing all the sections(if there aren't too many) located in your site with links to get to them. The disadvantage is that your visitor needs to get there first. It's is a wonderful technique to use as a supplement to your primary navigation but shouldn't be used as the primary form.

In summary, in order to be effective your navigation system should be consistent throughout the whole site, the main navigation links should be kept together,and the website should be organized with not too many links for each section. This is all to ensure that the visitor will learn how to effectively maneuver around the site and access all that the site has to offer.