In managing your ecommerce website, browser testing is a must. The appearance of your site may differ on different browsers and screen resolutions. For example, your website might look beautiful in Internet Explorer 7, but what does it look like in Safari on the Mac? What about Firefox, or in 1024 x 768 resolution? If you haven’t tested your site in the variety of popular configurations, then there is a good chance you are turning away customers.

Merchants should have a plan developed for ongoing browser test.

The following list could be followed:

1. Develop a schedule for your browser testing. You could test your site three to six months, or when there is a new released browser. Since browsers are updated so frequently, it is best practice to schedule some time to review browser usage trends every three to six months. Set a recurring calendar appointment and allow 30-60 minutes to perform the test.
2. Decide what to test. Choose what browsers, operating systems, monitor resolutions, and devices you will be testing your site in. This would include Windows and Mac operating systems; Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari and other browsers; and various monitor resolutions. Make sure to include browser versions, such as IE 7 and 8. Base your testing decisions on your analytics and demographic data.
3. Choose which pages to test. Decide what pages in your website will you be running a test, such as home page, product pages, etc.
4. Choose your testing platform. You may use BrowserCam.com, BrowserShots.org, and Litmus.
5. Review results, fix, and retest.

Make it a point to test your website every few months to ensure browser and operating system compatibility. When you are able to test your pages this way, you can at least reduce the number of problems your pages have with the different browsers. Sixty minutes of your time could save your thousands of dollars of lost sales due to the site not working properly on your customer’s computer.

Challenges in Creating a Commercial Website Design

Designing a commercial website is a demanding task. The website designer must learn how to put his creative ideas into reality. All the principles in basic designing in content, usability, appearance and visibility are applied.

In a typical world, web design consists of text and images. However, there’s even more to that. That’s why; I am writing this article to discuss the several issues you encounter while creating a commercial site.

1)     Rapid Technological Change- This process complicates the method of positioning resources to enhance web presence.

2)     Poor Layout- Layouting a website is a matter of content delivery. The idea of publishing different contents such as texts, photos, videos, boxes, automatic pop-ups, podcasts, etc. should imply the adaptation of creative standards. There must be a balance in all forms and functions.

• Text Readability
• Ease in Navigation
• How Well-Optimized the Site is

3)     Wrong Layout Type- Three of the popular dimension formats are: pixel measure in static content, em measure in proportional content relative to font size and percent measure in fluid content (shrinking and growing).

Choose the inappropriate layout type that is inconsistent with the overall theme of a website yield disaster. The hybrid design is generally prescribed by several experts due to its warm and balance effect it gives the eye. A good example of a hybrid design is Wordpress.com

4)     Issues on Layout Concerns- The use of space is becoming more fluid in its potential. When right spacing is applied, it immediately communicates the style to its target audience. Perhaps, some web designers tend to forget that no content is more at risk to changes and variations than the space.

5)     Wrong Utilization of Device- A web designer has absolutely no control over device manufacturers. Those operating system, mouse, touch screen, etc. can result to complicated browser changes. For this reason, these designers are advised to adjust target environment. They should put an effort to remove common mark-ups that corrupt web content.

Picking the right or perfect domain is where your eCommerce business strategy starts. On the web, your domain name serves as your identity. It is how customers will find you, remember you, and, ideally, return to you to buy lots of stuff. For any website, its domain name is the basic foundation for making it popular and a successful venture.
In order to allow Internet users to find your website “quickly and easily”, keep the following tips in mind.

• Keep it short and sweet. The shorter the domain name, the better. Short domain names are much easier to memorize compared to the complex ones. Pick a domain name that is less than 10 characters but not more than 20 characters. Exceeding this number is not recommended and it will be too complex for your customers to remember.
• Using domain names that have strange pronunciation or some unfamiliar word is a big NO. It can lead visitors to misspell it. Furthermore, avoid the use of hyphen and numbers. Most of the time, visitors would only remember either hyphen or number, if you have these in your domain they could forget the arrangement.
• Pick a domain name that’s suited for Search Engines, such as Google. Use the main keyword or phrase you’d like to optimize your entire site for. Don’t be too broad. At the same time, if you have a wide-ranging product base, don’t be too specific as well.
• Make sure your domain name is relevant to what you are selling. This helps when customers search for products or services your site offers. Think about your own ideal online shopping experience or if you haven’t experienced such yet, think about what you’d want that experience to resemble.

Having a perfect domain name makes your site appear more significant and pertinent to exactly what the customer is looking for. Have these tips in mind and don’t forget the three S’s- Short, Smart, and Significant!

What does it take to become successful in e-commerce? There are but so many things that people have tried yet most of them have failed in getting the desired results for their ecommerce marketing. That is why, there are a lot of online store owners who are trying their best to look for answers on how they could improve their online marketing.

This might be just the answer that you are looking for. Here are some of the time-tested ecommerce tips that you can use to give you an edge in the competitive world of the e-commerce business.

Since you might already have your own website model that you are already using or you are planning to use, just use this guide as checklist if your plan is able to cover everything. In this way, you can make sure that you did not leave out anything important that might become the reason for your online business to fail.

1. Who would forget SEO? It’s in everybody’s dictionary nowadays. If you do not know it then most probably you have your website somewhere at the nth page drowning under all the other better optimized pages.
2. No, Social Media Marketing not just used to meet new friends. More than anything else, it has become one of the latest and most powerful tools in ecommerce marketing. Not only are these sites free, they can also reach a very wide range of audience.
3. Although not a lot of people like the idea of the Pay Per Click method as an online marketing strategy because it asks you to spend money for your marketing, it has its own benefits. First, it transfers traffic much faster than SEO. Next, you can test new products and promotions when using this method and see which ones actually work or easy to sell and which ones are not. Lastly, in terms of key terms and phrases, you get to cover more and much longer terms and phrases than with SEO.
4. This next tip is ideal for those who has a retail or dropshipping business. Try to include links of popular shopping networks. They help you get more people to visit your site.
5. Have a joint venture with more popular sites that have the same content as yours and promise some form of promo, perks or the likes whenever they get to a customer to use, purchase from, or just click anything in your site.
6. You might think this does not work however it is very effective in informing customers and visitors to your site of the latest developments in your online business. It’s direct, cost-efficient and could reach a very big population of prospect clients.

Ever visited a graphics heavy website? How long does it take to load all of the images? Makes you feel lazy or impatient doesn’t it? That’s how visitors react to most web site, they just don’t like a slow loading site or in other words, people don’t like to wait. It’s easy to just browse then close their browser tab.

Making a web design isn’t easy as what most people think. A well planned web site will have a lot of visitors in the long run. Take a look at Twitter. Why do you think it’s popular and successful? From its topic search engine? Yes, but that’s not all. From its availability among other devices and easy to use features? Yes and yes. Twitter is easy to use, it has compatibility to other devices AND it’s a very light web design. The web design is ingenious. It’s fast and that’s all that matters.

Having a fast website makes a huge difference. Compared to other websites that also has the same idea, Twitter easily wins for being the easiest and fastest website. It’s clutter free and “tweets” are organized properly. That’s how a good web design should be.

Here are 3 easy tips that will help you build a fast and simple web site.

Let your design breathe
Let your design have a comfortable feel. Don’t cram all your web page elements into one space. Let them have good spaces between them. Websites would look like a mess if you stick web elements too close together. It would also look different on other browsers and may overlap each other, so give your web design space.

CSS Optimization
Take a look at Andreas Viklund’s templates. His web designs are featured in Wordpress. CSS Optimization makes your sheets easy to understand, clean and easy to edit. How does this make your websites load fast? If you use less images and more CSS reliant on background colors, your web page would be lighter. It would also allow you to easily change your themes without going over your codes and touching HTML.

Avoid using multimedia
If your website doesn’t really need Flash or Java, don’t use them. It will only make your website look complicated and makes long loading time. Having great multimedia graphics is good but only if its actually useful and simple. Most of the time, these Java/Flash effects only makes it hard for people to access the information they want to get.