Building a Web Site For Dummies®, 3rd Edition

Designing for E-Commerce

You may understand Web site design in general, but designing an online store requires some special considerations. Face the fact — if you’re building a shopping mall in the real world, do you want an architect who specializes in houses or an architect who’s built stores all his life?

Yes, your Web site must display a pretty face. Yes, it must perform all the functions you need to show your wares and process orders. But the key point to Web design is this one rule:

It must be simple to use.

If customers face any kind of hitch in the process, you’re going to lose money. That’s guaranteed — 100 percent. As you plan the site design for an e-commerce store, you must approach it from the buyer’s viewpoint and concentrate on making the store easy to navigate and the buying process painless. Regardless of what you sell, here are some ways to satisfy your potential buyers’ needs:

✓	Include a picture of the product. If you sell some type of merchandise, make sure that you include at least one picture. Use thumbnail images instead of full-sized ones so that the basic product page doesn’t take too long to load. (Customers may lose interest if they must wait too long for the site to load.)
✓	Give detailed information, if appropriate. How much information you give depends on what you’re selling. With many products, you can easily fit all the necessary information about ...