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.

More often than not, ecommerce websites’ success depends on how good it looks rather than how good it is. Consumers often judge how professional and how trustworthy an online store is through its aesthetics. There are many online retailers that are expert in their field but not necessarily expert in web development or graphic design. They know all about the products they sell, but they may not know much about, things like white space, alpha transparency, or PHP. Thus, hiring a web developer or web designer is needed.

Consider these 5 simple tips on how to choose a good designer/developer.

1. If you were opening a new department store and you were hiring a contractor to build it from the ground up, you would ask for references. No one would trust a commercial construction project to someone they hadn’t checked out. The same goes for the contractor that will be building your online store. Ask for at least three references. You would want the know the quality of their work, how they manage and maintain schedules and how easy they were to work with.
2. In any online business, an ecommerce shopping cart is a must. It serves as a backbone of your business. It is the content management, reporting tool, order processing that you’ll be left with after your designer is off to other projects. Compare carts based on their features and based on your clients needs. Once you have finalized the field of shopping carts, look for designers that specialize in the cart you want. Avoid any cart that promises you that it can have your store up and running in an hour or less. It will be very satisfactory in the long run.
3. Hire a professional that can transform your business objectives into a successful design, not the one that simply does what you say. The web designer or developer you hire should be an expert that can translate your goals and objectives into a feature-rich, customer-pleasing online shopping experience. If a designer or developer has nothing to add or does not ask a lot of probing questions about your business values, differentiators, and goals, they are either not really interested or they are not really informed. He/she should have an opinion to contribute and should add value.
4. Get a statement of work before you start with your project. A statement of work should detail the designer’s understanding of your project, spell out an estimated time table, enumerate the exact services the professional will be providing, and provide a specific price estimate as well as an estimate of how extensions or expansions to the project will be handled. If a developer or designer cannot describe the project in a statement of work, don’t hire them. It would be like trekking through the wilderness without a map or a GPS.
5. Web design and development is often a trade of the self-taught. So while a designer with a master’s degree in art should certainly know his stuff, don’t overlook a self-taught professional. If you judged him only by his academic credentials, you’d be missing out on a great professional. Experience and talent is more important than a degree.

Your website is crucial to the success of your business. By doing extensive interviewing of potential website designers and with the help of the tips mentioned above, you’re more likely to pick one that can do the work you want.

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.

In Web Designing, have you ever wondered what makes Google a very successful web site? It’s not just its search engine, actually that came second. Wanna know the secret? It’s the design.

It’s simple, effective and direct to the point. Just look at how Google looks like and compare it with Yahoo or MSN. They have too much images, design and has a heavy background while Google only has its logo and the almighty search bar! Even now that Google has a very big company and a lot of other improvements… they DID NOT change the whole idea/theme of their site. What’s the only that’s new on Google?? Well, it’s just a minimal image, blue link texts at the top where it won’t bother your vision, good sized fonts and the same BIG WHITE SPACE AND THE ALMIGHTY GOOGLE SEARCH BAR!

Imagine that you’re a user visiting Google first time, what is your first impression? That’s right, it’s some kind search site… exposing the big search bar up front, it would make you want to try it and by then you would realize that it’s a very good search engine!

Now if you want your website to attract a lot of visitors, you have to work on your web design. It’s the first step of any profitable business or anything on the net. Make beautiful and most importantly a useful web design. Content comes second then SEO then back to web design if you want your visitors to stay. It’s a cycle and it’s pretty important to learn.

Here are some of the tips that would help you make a simple and useful web design.

Make it simple
I’m being redundant but its true, if you want people to stay on your website or make them “like” your web site then make your web design simple. Minimize the use of images, if you should, make it useful and have a purpose.

Use white space
One way to make a simple and comfortable to read web site is using white space. White space means spaces on your web elements. Don’t let them stick too close together, let your web design breathe. Don’t cram your contents in one look and don’t worry about making your web design too long way down… that’s what scroll bars are for!

Fast Loading Time
How? Make use of vector images and optimize your CSS. Use color codes and avoid making a big graphic background.