Archive for March, 2008
Downloaded osCommerce, now what?
Posted on 24. Mar, 2008 by Dave.
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Intro: Two of our most popular products are osCommerce templates and CRE Loaded templates. Both are actually a combination of osCommerce 2.2 (ready built online store) provided by osCommerce.com and a unique template design from Foamers.net. Likewise we also offer professional osCommerce, CRE Loaded and or ZenCart templates customizations at affordable prices. In this article Tan Thomas offers as tips on how to customize your shopping cart as well as market your product.
Article: When you decide to go with osCommerce for your e-commerce site, you can simply take their stock layout and insert your information and voila! you have a completely functional e-commerce site ready for customers and sales.
If you’re like most e-commerce sites, however, you’ll want to go a step further than that and customize your “storefront” to make it better fit your product. If you are savvy in both the technical and marketing fields, this will probably be a no-brainer. If, however, you are an expert in your product, but not necessarily how to sell your product, this article is for you. It’s filled with tips to help you both design your site and well as market your product.
Design Your Site
1.Change your colors. You can go into your stylesheet.css file (in your catalog root folder) and simply change the colors from the stock layout. It’s amazing what a difference something as simple as a custom color layout can do for your website!
2.Choose a template. If you don’t want to start your website design from scratch, you can use a template that has everything you need for your site except the information.
3.Or, go even simpler. If you don’t want to change the complete template you can opt to change just one thing on the site. This could be the background, buttons or logo. Whatever you choose, just do something to make the site your own!
4. Improve your images. Spend some time learning image editing programs so that you can save your pictures in high quality with the smallest file size so that they both look great and load quickly. With the high speed of the Internet, most people don’t have the patience to wait for slow loading pictures and they may leave your site rather than waiting for the image to load completely.
5.Change the page titles. Make sure that you give each page a descriptive title so that when the page appears in the search engines it gives people enough information to get them to want to click on your link.
6.Put your self in your customer’s shoes. Customers do not like long drawn out checkouts. If you can get the information you need in two to three pages (including the confirmation of information page), your site will have an advantage over those sites that draw it out. The osCommerce forum has information on how to do this.
7. Get a design expert who is experienced with osCommerce. By installing STS Template system or some other equivalent, they can customize your shopping cart to anything. This website lists a series of osCommerce website which had gone through a serious make-over. http://www.efusiontech.com/E-Commerce-Projects.html
Market Your Product:
1.Make your site unique. This is a basic marketing technique and is sometimes referred to as creating a Unique Selling Proposition. Basically, this is a simple statement that tells people what makes your site and your business unique from other businesses, especially those in the same niche. Whether you always offer free shipping or guarantee the lowest prices, your unique selling proposition is what sets you apart from the rest.
2.Don’t forget to sell your product! Getting people to your site and getting them to stay on the site are important, but once they are there you need to SELL the product. You won’t be there to tell them about the items and they aren’t in a bricks and mortar store to examine the product themselves, so your descriptions need to do these jobs for you and the customer. Be detailed, be specific and be honest. Include who would likely enjoy the product and why they would need it. Instead of focusing on the details of the product or service, put some emphasis n the benefits.
3.Make your store more than an online entity. Give your customers a way to contact you. This includes a name, address, email and phone number. If they have no way to get into contact with you, your credibility with the customer declines.
4.Offer more than just the product or service. Don’t be afraid to add articles, tips and information related to your product for customers coming to your site. It will increase your credibility as well as give them reasons to return to your site even if they don’t have an immediate need for your product or service. Related to this is sending out a periodic newsletter that gives useful information, announces specials and sales and highlights specific products.
With just a few customizations your osCommerce store can be a unique site that fits your philosophy, product and needs. You can view samples of some oscommerce website from eFusiontech.com who has done over a hundred osCommerce implementation with customized skin and layout.
About the Author
The author is a designer working in Singapore
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Are You Making The Most of Your Home Page?
Posted on 20. Mar, 2008 by Dave.
In a previous post, Is Your Site Search Engine and User Friendly, we discussed a number of ways to make your site both search engine and user friendly. Essentially the whole idea is to ensure that your site helps users find their content easily. In other words, is the content organized in an easy-to-read hierarchical layout? Are we using HTML links on every page? Moreover, do your pages contain relevant information that clearly and accurately describe your focus and is that text clear, crisp and legible? In this article we will learn how to apply that same practicality focusing primarily on the home page.
The most important part of any home page is the upper portion; the part that is viewable without having to scroll down to look at what else is included on that page. It is tempting therefore to cram everything you can into that top portion, to ensure that all the important stuff can be seen as soon as the page loads.
But this can be a big mistake. In this world of graphics, content and images, less really can be more. Our ever increasingly impatient society has an attention span which stretches to mere seconds, not long enough to scan and digest even a fraction of what many people try and cram onto their home page.
It’s advisable therefore to go back to basics and make a note of what your website is really all about. What do you want your visitors to get from it? What is the single most important message you want to get across? What would you like your visitors to do? Sign up for a free newsletter? Click through to other pages on your site?
Whatever actions you would like your visitors to perform, you need to make sure they are visible and accessible on that first screen. Don’t overcrowd your home page; instead, make sure you have a nice clear and clean border around that sign up box you have for people to fill in and join your email list. It will stand out more and get a better response if you do.
When you are planning or redesigning your home page, think about adding smaller blocks of easily readable content, rather than adding a long article that would be better saved for another section of your site. Don’t overwhelm people as soon as they arrive, let your home page point towards other areas of interest, while remaining clear and simple to understand itself.
Creating a good home page that converts visitors into sign ups and encourages them to explore the site in more depth takes time and experimentation. It is certainly an ongoing process, but each improvement you make will have a direct bearing on how well the site performs as a whole , so it’s worth persevering.
About the Author
Pro Wordpress Themes is a collection of high-quality, professional Wordpress themes designed by world-class graphic artists and made available to download free of charge. To download a free Wordpress theme please visit Free Website Templates.
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Fixed Width Vs Liquid Layouts
Posted on 11. Mar, 2008 by Dave.
Intro: In the last article “Top 5 Design Principles Behind Web 2.0 Templates” I talked to you a little about Web 2.0 templates and how one of the characteristics of Web 2.0 are central layouts. In this article we discuss the pros and cons between liquid layouts vs fixed width commonly know as central layouts. The author Moe Tamani explains what both design layout really mean and examines the best approach for you to use on your website.
As every experienced web designer should know, there are two types of layout that you can choose from when designing web pages. One is the fixed width layout and the other is the liquid layout. The fixed width layout sets the width of the web page at a specific value, no matter how wide the viewer’s internet browser window is, whereas liquid layouts adjust their width depending on the width of the visitor’s browser window. The choice between these two layouts is not always an easy one and we will explore in depth the factors that will influence your final decision.
Fixed width layouts mean that you have a preset width which you will design the rest of your web page around. The main advantage of this approach is that it gives you greater direction and control over the eventual organization of your web page. Fixed width layouts are best used with print backgrounds, because these help maintain a consistent appearance even across different internet browsers and operating systems. In a liquid layout, however, the overall layout of your page is a percentage function of the size of the browser window being used to view it. They are useful for maximizing the use of space provided by any screen resolution or browser window size. Web designers who are tasked with conveying as much information as possible in a limited amount of space will often choose a liquid layout. It is important to both you and your web design company that you understand which layout would suit the needs of your client better.
Which layout you eventually choose will greatly affect the final look and feel of your web site, not to mention the functionality of the site. The ease with which visitor’s can scan through your site for relevant information and identify the content that they wish to find is largely dependant on your choice of layouts. It is thus absolutely essential that you understand the needs of your client and the kind of website that they want you to build in order to design a web site that reinforces the marketing strategies of your client. Your web design company is also likely to stress the importance of choosing the right layout when you take on any projects.
The Web Design Benefits and the Drawbacks The pros and cons of each layout type are listed below, so you will be able to make a better-informed decision regarding which type of layout you should use for a particular project.
Fixed Width Layout o Pros * Pages that you design look exactly the same when viewed using any internet browser or operating system. * Images and other non-textual objects will not overwhelm the textual content of the page, regardless of the size of the browser window or viewing monitor. * The scan length of your pages stays constant no matter how wide the viewer’s browser window is. o Cons * Viewers using smaller browser windows or monitors to view the site will probably have to scroll horizontally to see the entirety of the page. This tends to annoy online visitors. * A large amount of whitespace is usually generated when viewers use large browser windows to view the site, resulting in wastage of otherwise useful space. Also, more vertical scrolling may be required than should be necessary. * Font size changes can adversely affect the overall layout of the page. Large increases in font size can cause the layout of your page to become distorted, making it messy and unappealing.
Liquid Width Layouts o Pros * Layout adjusts its size to fit any browser window size. * All the available space in the browser window is utilized, enabling larger windows to display more information while not compromising the viewing experience using smaller window sizes. * You can achieve consistent relative widths, ensuring that your web page can accommodate your client’s varied design requirements such as font size changes. o Cons * Liquid layouts do not allow you to fix the width of the page and other elements on the page, making proper organization difficult in some situations. * Columns containing text may become either too wide or too narrow for comfortable viewing of the text. * Fixed width elements on the page may not be correctly displayed. Some browsers may attempt to correct for a lack of space for fixed width elements by increasing the width of the element, thus disrupting the order of the other elements in your layout.
Often, the best approach to use is to use both types of layout within the same web site or even within the same page. The type of layout you use may be dependent on which part of the site you are currently working on. A good example is fixing the width of the central column of the page so that text contained does not become distorted while allowing the layout for the rest of the page to be liquid, making viewing of side-bars and other elements more flexible. With practice and diligence, you will eventually learn the best combination of both layouts to use in any situation that you encounter.
About the Author
Moe Tamani is a SEO web design consultant Dallas Web Design.
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Top 5 Design Principles Behind Web 2.0 Templates
Posted on 06. Mar, 2008 by Dave.
Many of the best examples of web 2.0 have some elements that make them, well, Web 2.0 style. Yet Web 2.0 is an oft-overlooked design style, and even more often misunderstood especially in terms of value and implementation. Making a site interactive and yet still comprehensive is not an easy thing to do.
Wikipedia describes Web 2.0 as “a second generation of web-based communities and hosted services such as social-networking sites, wikis, blogs, and folksonomies, which aim to facilitate creativity, collaboration, and sharing among users”. While this is an accurate description of the term, nothing says Web 2.0 more than central layout, big text, strong colors, round corners and an intuitive navigation.
Web 2.0 templates are a lesson in Web 2.0 style – it’s as simple as that! Their beauty comes from an intuitive use of layouts, rounded corners, bigger text and brighter color surfaces, which give them a polished Web 2.0 style.Centralized layouts: As apposed to jamming everything in one place (e.g. left-orientated scalable layouts), Web 2.0 templates centralized layouts bring simplicity into focus by positioning the content in the center of the page. It’s not overwhelming, there’s less information to process and the right allocation of large fonts and white space presents a better more amicable experience.
Example Template No. 16962
Navigation: The ease of navigation needn’t be compromised. The Web 2.0 template style of navigation is typically horizontal, utilizes large fonts and is always clear and concise.
Brighter color surfaces: The old Web 1.0 always felt a little drab, part of the reason for that was the almost total lack of color. Web 2.0 templates are typically characterized by color. The colors are bright, fluorescent like, cherry colors – blue, orange, lime-green and a myriad of rich surfaces and reflections harmoniously twined with white space to deliver an open and friendly feeling.
Bigger fonts: Another component of Web 2.0 templates are clear large fonts. Large font can help place the eye on the things you feel should stand out. Large fonts are perfectly acceptable on the web, as long as you employed them judiciously.
Rounded corners: Boxes with rounded corners aren’t anything new; the only difference with Web 2.0 is that they’re now standards-compliant. The trick is Web 2.0 templates use CSS to implement the illusion of curves, instead of the old fashion method that involved slicing the top and bottom of a rounded rectangle, a table with three rows and a lot of time on your hands.
Web 2.0 falls right into the category of design where many people think it’s easy, yet an understanding of layout and white space and, even more, an understanding of communication, is vital. All of the elements (centralized layouts, strong colors, round corners, big text) readily attributed to Web 2.0 templates are carefully crafted by professionals who are passionate about design. On that note, we entreat you to consider the convenience and practicality of obtaining professional customizations. The result is a unique product that works intuitively to help the user (your customer) find anything on the site.
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