Small Business Web Design
In case if your small business is venturing into ecommerce, you may be daunted by the technical wizardry you think is involved. But don?t be feared: complete web store software packages will keep all the technical wizardry safely behind the screen, so you dont have to worry about it. All you required to do is choose a design, stock your store, and promote it. Below is how to do that.
Designing Your Online Store: Opting for a Template
When beginning a brand-new online store for a small business, youre better off choosing a pre-existing design template rather than having a design done from scratch.
Templates: In case if youre not quite sure what kind of design youd like, you can browse through the design templates included with most hosted online store programs.
Themes: Few online store builders take the design template concept one step further, with "themes." Themes are more or less templates that include not only basic design elements but also text styles such as font faces and sizes. In addition Themes also allow for slightly different pages across a website with a single unified design, without having to configure each page individually. For example, a web store theme might include a product description page, a product category page, an "add to cart" page, and a checkout page. Just by opting for a single theme, you have all the pages in the shopping cart designed with a single, unified professional design, just like big, successful web stores.
Theme builder: In case if you want to make changes to a theme-say a different font or a different color-some web store software packages make it easy with a "theme builder." With the help of theme builder, you can select values for features such as color and font. What?s more you can even choose to build a theme from scratch, though for most web stores this will be a case of re-inventing the wheel unnecessarily. You dont required to know anything about HTML; the interface is much like a word processing program.
Professional design: In general once youve created your store using templates or a theme builder, you can turn to a professional designer to make your site really special. Still, it is worth noting that you may want to stick with the basic template or theme-builder site until you have a firm idea of how users are interacting with it and what elements are working. By following this route youll have concrete requests to make of the designer.
Building Your Online Store: Inventory
There is no doubt in the fact that the foundation of any online store is the products or services being sold. With large chunk of web store and shopping cart software packages, the functions for adding, removing, and pricing items are collectively called "inventory."
Even in case if youre selling intangibles such as downloadable software, you will use the inventory functions to specify how the items will be sold. There are choices for setting the available quantity in stock to unlimited, or handling just about any kind of permutation of selling products or services online. Theoretically speaking Web store software makers have seen it all.
One of the brilliant things about using a hosted web store software package is that if you do have trouble setting something up, you can get help quickly from customer service.
Adding New Web Pages to an Online Store:
In case if you want to add new pages to your online store, the store creator software can help. On the other hand if all you want is to add a new product, you only have to use the "add a product" feature, which is often listed under "inventory." Though, if you want to add pages for sales copy, manuals, privacy policies, terms and conditions, the store creator interface is the way to do it. Plenty of online store creators have a way of adding pages to a web store without having to use HTML; you simply type in your text in the form and upload any images.
Getting Your Store Found in Search Engines:
Furthermore in order for your online store to generate the most business possible, youll want to make sure that your store is easily searchable for Internet shoppers. Unfortunately, few web stores create pages using a dynamic script that search engines cannot index.
Often you can tell in case if a web store cannot be indexed by search engines by looking at the URL of an inside web page (the homepage, also called the index page or "front page," will usually be search-engine-index-able no matter what). In case if the URL is a long string of characters that is slightly different from one user to the next (say, when you open the page on your computer and someone else opens the page on another machine), that likely means the site is using "session IDs" which search engines have a notoriously difficult time interpreting. If the URL is something easier, such as "domain.com/category-5/product-6.php", the page is much more likely to be search-engine friendly.
The ideal way to check whether a web store or shopping cart software produces "search-engine-friendly" pages is to check the documentation; software thats search-engine-friendly will usually say so.
Of course, as is pretty much the case with any website, doing well in search engines still requires your site to have links pointing to it and some text on the pages. Moreover just because search engines can index a page doesnt mean theyll return it for any searches.
In case you have identified that to have an internet presence would be of benefit to your small business, however are not sure how to proceed.
The main thing you need to do if find a suitable web designer or web design company. Due to the big amount of competition out there you should be able to find a quality professional web design company happy to build you a website from between ?50 and ?100.
You can get these companies on search engines, internet auction websites such as ebay, yellow pages, by asking family and friends, shop window advertisements or newspaper advertisements.
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