Developers have the challenge to make their websites easily adaptable on mobile devices. For the same, they can rely on responsive design tools like media queries to suit the requirements of a variety of screens of mobile browsers.

Benefits of Responsive Design

Responsive designs are better than specific mobile sites. The reasons are:

• No hassle of maintaining many sites. With a design that modifies itself automatically for any device saves time and also, you have the same content for all users.
• There are no canonical URL issues with a responsive design. So webmasters won’t have to be concerned about ranking issues either.
• With a responsive design, there will be no issues about redirects going wrong.

Steps to Responsive Design

Webmasters have also noticed the steady increase in traffic from mobile devices. People using phones with HTML, CSS, and JavaScript supported browsers visit websites but the catch is the limited screen space with widths as narrow as 320 pixels. Google also addressed the issue of the choice between creating mobile friendly websites, or modifying existing sites and new ones to be displayed nicely on both computers as well as mobile phones.

As Google expresses its concern, “Creating two sites would allow us to better target specific hardware, but maintaining a single shared site preserves a canonical URL, avoiding any complicated redirects, and simplifies the sharing of web addresses. With a mind towards maintainability we leant towards using the same pages for both.”

This means that you need a responsive design for your website where:

• The pages would display properly on any screen resolution
• The content can be easily viewed on any device
• There will never be a horizontal scroll bar for mobile devices

Liquid Layout

Web masters can begin on the path to make their websites mobile friendly by making that the stylesheet enables a liquid layout. Use max width and min-height as this will not cause the larger fonts or multi-line text to break the container’s boundaries. You can also stop the fixed width images from “propping open” liquid columns by applying the following CSS rule:

img {

max-width: 100%;

}

As you know that media queries are now well-supported in modern browsers as well as a majority of mobile devices. These queries can be the distinguishing factor between sites which degrades well on a mobile browser, and the site which improves to benefit from the streamlined User Interface. An important thing to consider here is the way smartphones represent themselves to web servers.

Viewports

You site has to display clearly for Android and iOS devices. You have to consider the ‘overview mode’ of view offered by these smartphones. The fact is that smartphone browsers work as high-resolution desktop browsers, display the page just as you would see it on a computer. Users then have to zoom in to see the page/read it. Your site has to adjust to the default viewport width for Android browser is 800px, and for iOS is 980px.

You have to ensure that your page is rendered on smartphones in a readable manner, not requiring the users to zoom in first. You can do this with the use of the viewport meta element:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width, initial-scale=1″>

With this code, a 320px wide image would be sized to the full width of the screen (it will be double the number of pixels if your mobile screen is 640 physical pixels.) Most standard smartphones have a device-width in the region of 320px.

There is another benefit of setting the width to device-width in the viewport meta tag. When the user flips or changes the orientation of their smartphone or tablet it updates itself. So, you simply combining this with media queries and change your layout as the user rotates their device:

@media screen and (min-width:480px) and (max-width:800px) {

/* Target landscape smartphones, portrait tablets, narrow desktops

*/

}

@media screen and (max-width:479px) {

/* Target portrait smartphones */

}

Here is how you can use the orientation media query to aim at particular orientations without referencing pixel dimensions, where supported.

@media all and (orientation: landscape) {

/* Target device in landscape mode */

}

@media all and (orientation: portrait) {

/* Target device in portrait mode */

}

Content

Remember that for benefitting from the power of media queries, you have to set up a liquid layout and add a few media queries to provide better user experience to mobile surfers. Opt for a broad set of breakpoints and do not target precise device resolutions. For screen resolution 800 or lower pixels, send the less important content to the bottom of the page-

@media screen and (max-width: 800px) {

/* specific CSS */

}

For smartphones:

@media screen and (max-width: 479px) {

/* specific CSS */

}

Following these steps will allow you to make the site compatible with a wide range of devices.

The Takeaway

When you work on making your site accessible on mobile devices and narrow viewports, starting with liquid layouts is the right move. However, you must be prepared to make some alterations to your design too. You can spruce up your look for many devices by adding media queries too. Keep on testing the look and functionality of your site on various mobile devices to know what all needs work. Be ready to cater to mobile traffic and see your business grow with it.

Most businesses want to know the cost of bringing their store online before they firmly put their virtual mart plans in action. This infographic details the basic cost of starting an ecommerce store. Candid has expertise in creating e-businesses and can help you with your online store requirements. Contact us for further details about this affordable and highly effective service offer.

Shopping Cart Abandonment and Tips To Avoid It provides retailers with essential tips to hold on to their customers, and take the shopping cart to the shipping section. What do you think of these tips? Do you find them useful?

We, at Candidinfo, have always delivered e-commerce website designs that are easy to navigate and browse through by the customers. More importantly, our e-commerce designs are ‘site-load speed’ friendly. In other words we ensure that the visitor does not lose interest in the site due to slow loading time. We have worked with the knowledge that the average visitor is less than likely to wait for the site to load and it is even less likely for the visitor to become a customer.

The 10 Seconds Threshold -

This understanding of visitor behavior has been observed and made a note of by the cloud-computing giant, Rackspace. The company surveyed 2000 UK adults about their average expectations when using websites. The results show that as much as 38% of the people do not wait for more than 10 seconds for a site to load. Yes, the waiting cut-off point is of around 10 seconds. If these people had to wait a second more than this time, they would hit the ‘Back’ button.

A further revelation may be a cause of grave concern for e-commerce site owners. Of the lot of users hitting the ‘Back’ button, a huge 45% never visited the site again, and more over chose to go to a competitor’s website to complete their shopping or ordering or product search.

Other Sites Have To Match The Pros -

Before you think that the 10 second threshold standard is too short for websites, then think again. The leading e-commerce platform, Amazon passes the test with a few seconds load time on a standard 12 Mbps broadband connection. Keep in mind that Amazon is a big site with plethora of images and graphics, and still it makes it before 10 seconds. So, your e-commerce site has to match up to this 10 second threshold if you want to hold on to your visitors, and make sure they keep coming back.

Candidifo can help you achieve this task and do more, as we specialize in creating affordable, professional and customized E-commerce website designs Outsource to us, and watch your business grow.

So, you have decided to become an online retailer, and are going full steam ahead with setting up an e-commerce platform. Now, to sell products and services on the internet can be really smooth sailing only if you are doing things the right way. You need to understand how to execute the establishment of a solid business in the right manner.

There are some definite steps that you need to undertake so that your ecommerce site is will become the dominant force in the market. The primary questions in your head regarding setting up an e-commerce website, are answered below-

What Do You Want To Sell?

You need to have a sure and well researched answer to this question. You have to find your niche. Think about the products you will be selling; are they good enough? Will they find audience on the internet? The bottom line is that they also need to have a high sales potential.

Hot Tip- Try avoiding a niche, that is saturated, this will make it really difficult for you to find a place in the market. If you want to sell clothes, then may be do so at the local level if the national level has the big players dominating the market.

How To Set Up The Website:

Now, that you know what you will be selling, the next decision to make is building your online store that is the website. You have the following options in this case- you can build it or host it on an ecommerce software package.

For those on a limited budget, it is not advisable to have a website built from scratch. You can go for a website company providing a hosted e-commerce software package. There are many such vendors on the internet that will help you set-up low cost websites. These are really convenient, you can design themselves without the need for any design skills. You must ensure that you have the access to edit the websites code. With this code access, you can later afford to have a designer build a customized look for your site. You must be able to edit your own site so that you can add or remove widgets/logo etc.

You must make your website with sections for products/categories/pictures and an easy payment routes. Your website design must be pleasing to the eyes and directs the visitors towards a desired experience path. With the use of colors -pictures and content, you need to direct a visitor’s actions on your site.

Hot Tip- Your website design is crucial in holding on to the visitors. An average visitor spends just 10 seconds or even less in judging a website. So, an attractive design supports the usability of the site, and you must design keeping the same in mind.

More on setting up websites here-

What Are Ecommerce tools? How To Integrate Them?

E-commerce tools are the essence of your ecommerce platform, and their integration depends on the hosting platform you have chosen. The key ecommerce tools have been discussed below-

• Shopping Cart

Like in a real or lets say a brick and mortar store, the shopping cart on an ecommerce platform is really important, in fact, even more. A good cart ensures a smooth e-commerce transition. There are certain elements that make up the cart- Merchant tools, Shopping features, payment options, shipping and taxes and security. You must customize all the above for a truly great shopping cart.

• Payment Options

You have to set up hassle free payment options on your ecommerce site. The ways of accepting on-line payments are either through -

Credit Cards, Checks, E-checks, Cash On Delivery, Phone Orders, and in direct personal contact.

• Merchant Accounts

You need to get a merchant account set up with leading banks in your area. With this account only, will you be able to accept credit cards as payment that the customers may make for your products and services. If you have a big bank backing you, do display it on your site to assure the customers that you can be trusted regarding the buying-selling and payment of any products. People will trust you.

• Payment Gateway

You need to set up a payment gateway. This is how it works- when a customer enters credit card information while buying your products, the information goes to the merchant web server- passed to a payment gateway through a secure socket layer (SSL). This payment gateway is the step where the software verifies all of the credit card information, after it has received the transaction data. The result of this verification lead to the acceptance or decline of the credit card. Then the payment gateway generates an email receipt and sends the same to the merchant web server and to the customer. The merchant’s bank is notified of the transaction by the payment gateway and the money is placed in a 30-day holding merchant account owned by you or your business.

Hot Tip- Set up clear payment/return and shipping instructions for the customers. They must feel secured while dealing with you.

How To Promote Your Business Online?

If you are of the thought that “build it well and they will come”, strategy will work here, then you are wrong. There are a million similar websites on the net, and you have to make yourself visible. Some of the essential marketing strategies include search engine optimization; pay per clicks, banner ads, and affiliates just to name a few.

The idea behind all of these strategies is to generate traffic to your site. To begin with, you need to identify your target audience and get on with it.

SEO

When you set up your ecommerce site, you must remember to make it open to search engine optimization Your products and services’ names will become keywords, that will lead the people looking for them on the internet to your site. So, you must optimize your website, make it search engine friendly. Only then will your business truly take off. You must make sure that your homepage, and other product pages appear in the search engine search results for relevant keywords. As an ecommerce platform, you will get more than 60% of your traffic from search engines, so you better get good SEO done for your site.

Other methods of generating traffic and promoting your site are-

• Paid Search Advertising (PPC)
• Social Media
• Article Marketing and Press Releases
• Email Marketing
• Ads in Print Media
• Electronic Media promotional Spots- TV and Radio

While you are marketing for your site, make plan everything according to your target audience-the people who will be most interested in buying what you sell.

Hot Tip- Getting Customer reviews and user generated content for your products is a good marketing tactic. This will improve your credibility among the other customers.

What To Learn From The Competition?

Like any business, and that too a startup, you can learn a lot from the established businesses in your niche. Assessing your competition will prepare you for competing with them in the future. You need to stay ahead of your competition and you can do that by knowing what they are doing. So, keep an eye out for-

• How are they promoting their products?
• Any special offers like reduced shipping charges?
• The keywords being used by them ?
• Where are they getting their link juice from?
• Is their website easier to navigate through than yours?

Hot Tip- To get a first hand idea of their promotional activities, you must subscribe to their email newsletters.

Parting Words:

Once you are through with the above steps, and you start getting traffic and customers, the most important tasks will be:

• To Hold On To The Customers
• To Make Sure They Come Back
• To Give Them A Good User Experience
• To Provide Full Customer Satisfaction With Your Bills And Products.

More on how to do the above, in the write ups coming soon.

What do you think of this? Will online shopping in India, take a giant leap? Do leave your comments on this.

As an e-commerce platform, your home page plays the most important part in promoting your site. The home page content not only markets your business to the customers, but also to the search engines. For your site to show up high in search engine results, you need to have the right content on your home page, so that the site is promoted in a wholesome manner.

To tell you what to do, lets begin with what not to do! Yes, you need to know what is the wrong path to take in the case of the home page for an e-commerce website.

An E-Commerce Site’s Homepage is Not:

• A dumping ground for everything. Too much information about your company – like how you started, then what happened, and so on.

Hot Tip- People want to know what you sell and not too much about who you are and where you were born!

• The homepage is not a product catalog. You need not list each and every product you sell! It will be too much information for the visitors. Also they may feel choked and pushed too hard to make a purchase on the homepage only.

Hot Tip- You should list all your products if you sell like only one or two things! Secondly, give a short and broad list of categories that will take people to the special product pages. Also, feature a discounted or special offer product on the homepage- it grabs attention!Unknown Object

• Your homepage is NOT your newsletter. It must not have full 250 words press releases on it!

Hot Tip- The best idea is to include a teaser paragraph of each article on the homepage, with a link to the web page with the full text. Do not bore people with information they don’t want.

• Do not make it your blog home page! People want interesting content, but they want to see other stuff too.

Hot Tip- Just display the catchy headlines and introductory paragraphs. Let people go on to the blog themselves.

The “don’ts” out of the way, you probably want to know what is good to display on homepage. What should be the content that you must place prominently on your site? For this, you need to do a bit of soul searching. To know what content to write on your site, you need to know what is the purpose of your site. What do you want from your site? The most obvious answer for an e-commerce platform is to get more business, drive more sales. Well, for this, you need to ensure that your site fulfills the following requirements-

• Your site is the complete guide to your business. What you do- who you are and what makes you different.
• It is an authority of sorts on the products you sell- be it through reviews or customer generated content.
• Your website must serve as a good referral point.

Now that we have touched on the site’s essence, lets get to the issue at hand, home page content. Well when you get down to working on it, here are a few key guidelines to keep in mind while you are writing content.

Home Page Content Writing Tips:

Tip 1- Your homepage content should be concise- You need to grab the attention of the users and also tell them the essential stuff. So the key is being short and simple- in order to achieve effective communication. Avoid long sentences and repetitive lines.

Tip 2- Your content must satisfy the query people used to search and come to your site- People have come looking for something to your site and your home page must provide them with that, unless you want people to hit the “Back” button.

Important Snippet- To prevent bounce backs, make sure that you link the referring keywords to the right page. Do not link everything to the home page. It leads to poor user experience.

Tip 3- Your content must represent the entire theme of your site. Is it lively? Serious? Emphatic? Young? The tone of the content has to match your products!
Tip 4- Your home page content must be convincing- Users must be forced to stay and explore more. You are the best in your niche, that is something you have to convince the users for. But again, do not over sell.

For more insights on home page tips- see this video:

Armed with the tips given above, you must be clear now, as to what approach to take while you frame your content. Go through the suggestions below, so that you create SEO friendly marketing content for the homepage of your e-commerce platform-

Write Who You Are And What You Do?

Your homepage must give an interesting description of what your e-commerce site is about and what it sells or promotes. So, if you have first time visitors, they will know where they are and what they stand to get. Provide a snapshot of who you are and what visitors can do on your site, via the home page content. So your flow could be something like this for a book selling site:

“Books4U is a niche audience business that specializes in selling self help books from top authors around the world. We are a medium sized enterprise, that operates from Victoria, London, and supplies books to our customers across the 7 continents. We have a list of Bestsellers and New Entries from which you can choose and add the books to your cart.”

You must remember to add links to your shopping cart, informational articles, and product lists too.

Tease Your Audience For More:

Your home page must have a snapshot of promising products and information available in the pages inside. You may include a tip of the week, that may be related to a certain product, and take the visitors to that page. The idea is to make your visitors stick to the page and explore further.

You can also feature a bestseller product, with a short description and then link it to its own web page or its place in your “products and services page“, catalog or shopping cart. This will make people curious enough to find out what’s so special about the product that everyone is buying it!

For example, continuing with the book retailer example-

“Want to know who your favorite self help books author is dating? Or why readers have gone wild with the new book by celebrated author- Mr. X?”

Write On What Makes You Different And How Will Shoppers Benefit From You:

Yes, why you and not the hundreds of similar sites? What makes your e-commerce platform so different? You must highlight the features and benefits of the products your site sells and how differently from the others.

People need to be convinced that you indeed are different from the others. For instance, “We are dedicated to bring to your reading table, the best that the literary world has to offer. Buy the latest books that have just entered the market, at reduced early bird prices. As for the really popular books, the old favorites, you can get exclusively autographed copies from our site. These signed copies are few, so book your copy fast!”

This is your big marketing pitch. You have to create content for your e-commerce site’s homepage that is full with your sales pitch. So you can offer discounts like free shipping for one side, or you could harp on your expertise in the business. All of this has one purpose only, to make that sale. Also, assure the users that you have an easy return and exchange policy.

For instance, your words could be:

“Books4U is your best online guide in helping you choose the best self help book that can really make a difference in your life. Our 20 years experience in the field of books, will ensure that you arrive at the book that seems custom made for you. Just add the book to your cart and once you purchase it, we will ship it for free! In case you do not like the book, you can exchange it within 2 weeks, and get your money back. More on our exchange policy here.”

Write What Praises You Have Got From Previous Customers:

You should also always feature a Nothing works like a person to person impact. If you post one line testimonials from ex users, your credibility will soar high among the users. satisfied customer. It’s great if the satisfied customer can send you a picture of himself or herself. This is what you may write-

“See what Mike says about us- ‘Books4U were quite prompt in sending me the book. I feel so much better after reading it.”

Essential Tip:

Make sure you test your home page on a few people, before it goes live. Show it to people and get their honest opinion. Whether your content works or not, will be pretty clear then. You have to be short and effective as the user attention span is quite low, and you have a few seconds to make impact. Follow these guidelines and you should be good.

WordPress is a great platform for building your site. But once you are on the web, you need to tell people that you have arrived. Enter- SEO. You need to make your WordPress site search engine friendly and you can do the same by using various WordPress plugins. These little widgets can get you better search engine rankings, and here is a list of the prominent SEO plug-ins.

The Best WordPress SEO Plugins:

1. All in One SEO Pack -

The effectiveness and popularity of this pack will be evident to you, when you Google WordPress plugin, and this will come right on top. With this plugin you can automatically optimize your WordPress site by generating meta tags. The plug in will make WordPress use by default your blog tagline as your Meta description and keywords. You can easily optimize web page title, post titles, descriptions, URL structures and tags for each post. With the All in one SEO pack, you can customize each post/ update on your site to make sure that their relevance is understood by the search engines. Other features include-

• Automatically optimize your titles for search engines
• Advanced Canonical URLs
• Page Navigational Links Can Be Fine Tuned

2. WordPress SEO – This is another all inclusive SEO plugin, that does the work of 8 plug ins. It includes a snippet preview that lets you optimize your page titles, meta descriptions and keywords. Not to forget the XML sitemaps, and many other things.

Other features include Google analytics, breadcrumbs, building the canonical tag etc. Here is a list of its features:

• Post titles and meta descriptions
• Robots Meta configuration
• Canonical
• Breadcrumbs
• Permalink clean up
• XML Sitemaps
• RSS enhancements
• Edit your robots.txt and .htaccess
• Clean up head section

3. Scribe SEO – Scribe SEO is a paid plug-in that analyzes your post for keyword focus, gives you information about it and suggests improvements from an SEO perspective.

Here are some of the essential features.

• Optimize content faster
• Choose great keywords
• Preserve reader engagement
• Build quality links

4. Google XML Sitemaps- This WordPress plugin generates an XML sitemap so that the search engine spiders can crawl and index your WordPress site better. The XML Sitemaps give a clear view of your site’s structure to the search engines. Google XML Sitemaps also support other engines like Bing, Yahoo!, by notifying them every time a post is created. This plugin updates and rebuilds the XML file everytime and all the time you post something new. It also pings Google about the same. In this pug in , you may set it to write a normal XML file or a zipped file. There is the option of building the sitemap manually. Other features include:

• Calculates a priority for each post, based on the number of comments
• User interface to customize all parameters like priorities etc.
• Generates sitemap automatically

5. SEO Rank Reporter- As the name gives a hint, this WordPress SEO plugin lets you find certain keywords in your site, and track their prerformance. You get a report every three days, fully detailed with performance graphs, so that you know how are they doing. In case of a major fluctuation in any keyword’s ranking, you will get an email notification. This is a list of its primary features:

• Email notifications for ranking fluctuations
• Download a full CSV file containing all of your ranking data.
• List of keywords that drive traffic to your website and add them to the rank reporter.
• Search using other Google Country URLs (e.g., google.co.uk)

6. Redirection Plug In – This plugin lets you control 301 redirections, to keep track of 404 errors and also correct them. You can manually add 301, 302, and 307 redirections for a file or a post. You get a regular expression support. It works with WordPress and that is why Apache .htaccess is not required. Other prominent features include:

• 404 error monitoring – captures a log of 404 errors and allows you to easily map these to 301 redirects
• Custom ‘pass-through’ redirections allowing you to pass a URL through to another page, file, or website.
• Full logs for all redirected URLs
• All URLs can be redirected, not just ones that don’t exist
• Redirection methods – redirect based upon login status, redirect to random pages, redirect based upon the referrer!

7. Robots Meta -This plugin comes loaded with many features, like- automatically generating meta tags, optimizing page and post titles for search engines. Most importantly, it helps you in avoiding duplicate content. You can add noindex, follow robots Meta tag in your pages to prevent the search engines from indexing them. Other features include:

• Prevent duplicate content by stopping the indexing of subpages to your homepage, category pages, author pages and tag pages.
• You can also prevent the indexing of your comments feeds.
• You can easily edit the .htaccess and robots txt file within your wordpress admin panel.

8. SEO Friendly Image – SEO Friendly Image is a WordPress optimization plug-in which adds alt and title attributes to all your images. These image tags W3C and lead to better traffic. If your images do not have ALT and TITLE already set, SEO Friendly Images will add them according to the options you have set. If you have taken optimizing images for search engines seriously, their accessibility, and search engine indexability is increased a lot.

9. SEO Smart Links – SEO Smart Links is a WordPress SEO plugin , links the keywords in your new post/page to the previous ones. You can set up your unique keyword sets with matching URLs, with SEO Smart Links. . With this plug in you can set “No Follow” attributes and open links in new browser windows or browser tabs.

10. WP Super Cache – Site speed is now a ranking factor, and your WordPress Site plug in lets you cache your site. Use it to reduce load time and get better ranks. The plugin serves cached files in 3 ways- Mod_Rewrite, PHP and Legacy Caching. Of these, most users will opt for Mod_Rewriting as it is the fastest but PHP caching is almost as good and recommended too.

There are other plugins too, but these are the ones that will make your WordPress site, search engine friendly fair quickly!

Redesigning a website is an important decision. Simply overhauling it for the reasons like- “I don’t like the site” is not advisable at all. What you need here a rethink, as to why you need to redesign your website and is there a way, you can make little changes and get what you have been missing from your website.

Identifying The Itch

Where is the problem exactly. What is lacking in your site? Are you not getting what you expected? If your are not getting enough business out of your site, then maybe the reason has not much to do with the site’s design, but site marketing.

Again you need to know what you want from the site- sales- leads- comments from visitors- links from other sites? What is your desired position, and once you know the answer, you can figure out whether the problem can be eradicated with a marketing idea or a content management strategy. Redesigning may not be essentially required then!

You can achieve much more by effective landing page optimization or even working on your site’s navigation too. Overhauling and redesigning can be avoided as they are costly and can create further issues.

Redesigning Has Initial Hiccups

If one fine Monday morning you unveil your new site expect that things will go better now, you are mistaken. It may be severely down the hill for a while. Why? We have discussed below:

Brand Identity- You have built a name for your self, and people identify you with it. So suddenly changing the patterns and colors associated with your brand equity seems pointless. This example is for a bigger corporation, but imagine the shock you may experience, if Coca Cola turns to a Purple color from the red it has endorsed for decades?

The colors you use become your brand’s personality and are associated with your brand. People know you with these colors and patterns, that is why drastically changing them has a negative impact- you lose the brand equity. Modification is recommended not overhauling.

Confusing The Customers- This is in continuation with the the brand identification concept. If people find you changed overnight, they will not relate to you, trust you or even understand you. Their familiar site is now new- like a stranger, its unknown. They may even not like the new site, and hit the close button!

What If All Fails- This is a scary thought, but may be true. Even after you redesigned your site, there is no change in user behavior. You are back to square one. You still are clueless about what could be wrong now. So, do not overhaul everything at the same time. Keep introducing little changes, so that you know what change had an effect and which one did not. This will tell you what works for you, and what was wrong.

Enter Rethinking

Rethinking is an essential stage that comes into play right before the redesign process. You need to think the primary purpose of revamping your site. You need to work keeping in focus the primary goal of the website. You must think- whether you need to revise your company’s goal, or if the site is apt for your goal. Or are you connecting with the audience as per required by the goal. Rethinking gives you a better insight to what is happening and what needs to be done.

When Redesigning Is Inevitable-

There are certain situations in which you can’t do much except overhaul the site. Some of these situations are:

• If your company’s mission, logo, name, etc have changed.
• Your business areas as in products/services and offers have changed. You need a different approach for them (from a food seller, you add on juices too).
• You have found definite consumer feedback about your website.
• Your research shows site navigation problems.
• Content Duplication has been detected and you can forsee that causing problems.

There can be more reasons for changing the site, even if it is to just make it look modern. But the thing to remember is to change slowly and gradually.

Little Changes Mean A Lot

It is important for you to understand that a full website overhaul is time taking. That is why, start with little changes- that are really crucial to your goal- like ‘ sign up’, ‘buy’ or ‘hire us’ portions. Again, working on effective landing page strategy is quite helpful.

Other changes may include- just changing the headers graphics on all the pages. Or maybe adding social media widgets. You can also widen the site. Or create a new page with all the elements that you want. Maybe, if you can get away by just changing your logo (if that has been changed).

The Parting Shot

Well, there is nothing much to say, but this-

Pause. Think before you act.

Before we start talking about user experience, here is a number that might interest you- you have close to 10 seconds to hold on to your user. Yes, the time is limited and visitors have a very short attention span. This is a primary challenge as well as guidance tool that you have to keep in mind when you work on enhancing the user experience on your website.

So, the basic task is to capture the visitor’s attention in those few seconds you have and also make sure that he is led towards what he came looking for, or what you want the user to look at. You have to tell them/ answer them/ sell them or whatever in those 10- 12 seconds only, otherwise the loss is all yours.

Essentials Of User Behavior

Users are in a hurry, they have already chosen your site from search results/PPC/social media or whatever, and they know what other options they have left behind in the previous page. That is why you have to be pretty clear in putting forth what you have to say.

Users like quality, credibility and of course relevance- If your page has all of these, you are good, and they will stay on. Design should support the content and not overwhelm it.

Users scan your site and don’t read every line- so make sure you have attractive headings, banners, the works.

Users want control – If too many pop ups come on their windows, or videos start autoplaying, it leads to a very poor user experience. They may never come back to your site if the pop ups don’t leave them alone.

Enhancing The Key Experience

When a visitor lands on your page, you must make sure that he is helped in every way possible to find what he is looking for. Also, the first impression of the page must live up to the user’s expectation that built when he clicked on your link. The design of your site must be clear-precise and uncluttered so that the user is lured on to stay and explore.

Using Words Effectively- Words are the most important tool you have to grab the users’ attention. Say what you have to see and be very clear about it. If you have brought a user to your site for latest Nokia Phones, then have a clear-well placed and easily readable line- “Latest Nokia Phones At Great Discounts” on your site. Words are taken seriously by the users and they respect it too. You build user expectation with words, and clear promises are generally easier to keep. Clarity also results in better credibility.

Clear Call To Action – If a user gets confused on your site and is not clear about what to do, then your entire effort is lost. Remember that a user likes your site if he understands what he is doing. You must give clear, straight-forward cues, so that the user understands what is where and what he can do.

Be Speedy – It is a very logical thing, if the users don’t have the time, this means that they want the site to be fast and really fast. If your load time is long, then the back or the close button will be hit much more that you would like. Explore the option of speed optimization versus as it will bring improvement in retention and user experience.

Information Architecture For Usability

The basic idea here is to make sure that the user knows how to use your site- navigate it. If your site navigation is clear and consistent, then the users will stay on the page and will use it. Usability is basically the level of ease and comfort visitors feel when they come to your site and navigate for information -services or products. If your site is not clear about the “buy” button, then you cannot expect the user to comb thru the site to find one, they will get out of the site rather than doing that.

Do Not Make The Users Think- your site navigation must be clear enough so that the visitor is not confused or forced to think where he is and what he needs to do. This will only lead to a poor user experience.

Guide The Visitors- Your site navigation must not be cluttered, so the visitor gets lost. Any page on your site must not be more than 3 clicks away from the home page. Lead the visitors to your goal skillfully and clearly. Clarity is important.

Use Breadcrumbs- Keeping a clear visual hierarchy helps. Visitors must know clearly where they are in your site, and how can they go back or to another category. Keep the home page in front view from any page.

Little Graphics Help- The idea is visual design of a call to action. Like a shopping cart, or a mail envelope, or a verification tick- that guides users clearly as to what they are required to do on the page.

Enhance The Utility Of Your Site

Utility is web designing means that your site is capable of doing many things. You can buy a product- learn more about it, add it to wish list, get informed about the product through emails, chat with fellow shoppers, leave reviews on a site and much more! This is how the utility of a site can be understood. So give your users many options, but do not overload your site with too much of it. Strike a balance.

Think Mobile Usability

Well, more and more people are switching to mobile internet for everything and anything. So make sure that your site has a mobile version too, that can cater to the mobile net users. This version has to be even simpler with vertical navigation and more prominently placed call to action buttons (the mobile user has even less time!).

Testing Your Site

What better way to know whether your site is working or not, than testing it for usability. Testing will give you a clear picture of where you are in terms of usability and what can you do more. You’ll be pointed to the absence of major design flaws which will give you essential insights for your project. Remember that you must design something, test it, fix it and then test it again There are tools like- Google’s website optimizer, with which you can test the different variations of a page in terms of which page produces the most visitors who convert.

The Final Word

You have to make sure that the user experience, on your site has to be simply fantastic- your site should be attractive, uncluttered, clear in words and design, easy to navigate and most importantly highly relevant to what the user is looking for.