Seattle Website Design

Who thought shopping online could be so easy, simply opening a browser, conducting a search, finding a great product online and making a purchase is nothing out of the ordinary for millions of consumers each day.

The advantages of shopping online are
(1) zero traffic or commuting time
(2) no need to stand in long checkout lines and
(3) the ability to peruse dozens of shops to compare pricing with a few keystrokes of due diligence.

In addition, if you factor the convenience of online shopping it is a perfect synergy for savvy online consumers who maintain hectic schedules and are inclined to make the most efficient use of their time.

To capture the e-generation shopper in the competitive online shopping industry, the e-tailer requires a firm grasp of usability (to keep traffic on the site), search engine optimization (to get them there) as well as ways to to gauge trends, sales cycles, inventory management and all of the trappings that accompany e-commerce, enterprise and cycles of supply and demand.

E-commerce, or electronic commerce, has become increasingly popular and is now an important part of many sales and marketing strategies. Given that many consumers are cash-rich, yet time-poor, the flexibility that e-commerce provides has secured its growing popularity in both the B2C and B2B markets. Additionally, e-commerce enterprises are not burdened with large overheads in the way that traditional outlets are.

When considering an e-commerce system, the most important thing to make your site a success is to consider carefully the design of your website. The design and marketing of your e-commerce enabled website should make it both attractive and easy to use for your visitors and easily found by search engines.

A growing percentage of internet users now have high-speed internet access. However, this does not mean that your e-commerce site should exclusively use Flash or be particularly graphic intensive. There are still millions of people using a dial up internet connection who will become frustrated at the length of time that complex sites take to load. This may end up in an unnecessarily abandoned shopping cart and a lost long-term customer.

Web page design is a process of conceptualization, planning, modeling, and execution of electronic media content delivery via Internet in the form of technologies (such as markup languages) suitable for interpretation and display by a web browser or other web-based graphical user interfaces (GUIs).

1. Conserve bandwidth wherever possible and start with your photographs and images.
Broadband Internet access is still not universal, and even though current estimates point to nearly 80 percent of US households having Broadband we must still optimize our web pages simply as a matter of courtesy. Always use an image editor to reduce the size of images down to the exact size you want them to display on your web page. Never use HTML comments to make a large image squeeze down into a smaller package. Also, make certain that all images are down-sampled to only 72dpi in resolution. Computer monitors can only display images at 72dpi so anything higher is wasted bandwidth. Another great rule of thumb is to attempt to keep the total page size (including all images and scripts) to under 50k. This is very difficult to do, but small web pages load incredibly fast and get your information to the reader much more efficiently.

2. Think about the way you align text and images on each page.
Centered alignments are very weak visually. They are difficult to read, and simply don't use the space well. Left justified or right justified texts create smooth, clean lines that give the viewers eyes something to lock on to and focus their attention. You can further accentuate the alignment of the elements on your page by carefully using the edges of your images as guides for these alignments. Have your image be the left or right hand border of a text block. The image captures the attention of the viewer and the neatly aligned text makes the viewer want to read the information on the web page.

3. Pick a graphic or logo and design your web page’s color scheme based on that graphic.
At the same time don't be afraid to break with the color scheme of your company, school, or organization. Some colors look great on paper but look lousy on a computer screen.

4. Don't create it if you are not going to update it!
Nothing says "WE DON'T CARE!" as much as an organization’s web site that has old, stale, and outdated information on the home page. If you know that you will not have the time to update regularly then create a web page that will not go stale after a certain date. Present your information in present tense without any reference to dates or times. For more detailed and time critical web sites consider using a content management system (CMS) such as Joomla in place of writing raw HTML web pages.