Web Development Projects - E-commerce Portal Development.

Looking to work on Web Design & Development Projects? Find here new projects everyday.

ITMatchOnline.com is the easiest way to find right partners across the world.

Project Details:

Type : Project

Id :79214809

Category : Web Design and Development

Title : E-commerce Portal Development.

Description :

We are India based and looking to outsource our requirement of Ongoing Website designing. We are looking for professional and committed individual/organization to develop our e-commerce portal. The service providers should have good track record in PHP/MySQL along with Smarty Template Design and customizing ready made e-commerce products like shop script etc as these are imperative requirement for this project. The budget for this project is around USD 1000 per month and payment will be done every 15days. Interested service providers are requested to send us the details about the websites they have built with their quotations and proposals.

Budget Estimate :USD 1000 Per Month.

Country :India

Status: Closed

Are you interested to work on this project? Post your contact details Now! Click Here

20 Tips for Creating a Customer-Friendly Web Site

What annoys an Internet user the most? A quick unscientific survey of a local Internet café suggests the top three turn-offs are:

• Sites that are very slow to download;
• Ones that are confusing to use;
• Sites that do not contain the promised information;

The single most common reaction to sites like these is that the visitor very quickly moves on to another web site. Clearly, if you get things wrong there is usually no second chance.

How can you avoid this happening to your business? Well, here are twenty tips to help you when designing or redesigning your company’s web site.

Start with a clear understanding of the purpose of your site.

Is the aim of your site to sell, entertain, or inform? The design of your site should be consistent with its purpose. The requirements for a site selling software online will be very different from say the web site of a local community newspaper.

Plan the site with the customer in mind.

Imagine how your customers (existing and prospects) will use your site. Consider their reasons for visiting and their needs. Something that looks logical to you may not appear so to a first-time visitor.

Design for cross-browser compatibility.

Although Internet Explorer dominates, do not overlook those people who use alternatives such as Mozilla, Opera and Netscape. Make sure your site can be viewed in other browsers; that way you will not unintentionally reduce the number of visitors to your site.

Choose simplicity over complexity.

Unless you are a design company showcasing its skills, keep things simple. Visitors (especially frequent ones) may not be impressed by your complex animated graphics especially if they serve no apparent useful purpose. Make it simple for visitors to get to the content – that is what most of them are coming to your site for anyway.

Make the navigation intuitive and easy to use.

This is probably one of the two most important aspects of designing a web site, the other being content. Make your site’s navigation logical and clear. Ensure the most important and most often-accessed information is easy to find. Link names should be concise and self-explanatory. Test navigational links to make sure they work and keep them up-to-date.

Your site should be as visually appealing as possible.

Visual appeal is subjective but the design of your site will undoubtedly influence customers’ perceptions of your business as a whole. An uncluttered layout, careful choice of font size and colors and appropriate use of graphics and images should go a long way to ensuring your site creates a good impression of your business.

Apply a consistent design or ’look and feel’ to your site.

Keep design consistent across your site unless you want your visitors to ask themselves whether they have wandered into another company’s site by accident.

Integrate your web site design with your offline branding.

For many, the Internet is still an alien environment so reassure your customers by applying the same branding online as you do offline. After all, if you have spent a lot of money building your brand why spend more appearing to build an entirely different online brand (unless, of course, this is your intention).

Keep page size manageable to ensure speedy downloads.

Online visitors’ patience is measured in milliseconds and not everyone has hi-speed or broadband Internet connections. So, keep page sizes within reasonable limits to ensure that they download quickly. Optimize graphic size and avoid putting an image on a page unless it adds something for the visitor.

Ensure your site’s content reflects its purpose.

If yours is a sales site for example, ensure that your content concentrates on selling. Stay focused and avoid the temptation to upload content that is not relevant to your web site’s purpose.

Enable quick and easy location of information.

Quite simply, most customers will quickly leave your site if they cannot locate the information they are seeking. Internet users increasingly require information to be instantly available and there is no shortage of other sites eager to take business from you. Think what information customers are likely to want and do not hide it away.

Make sure content is relevant, accurate and up-to-date.

Provide accurate and relevant content and keep it up-to-date. Failure to do this will make your company look inefficient and reflects badly on your customer service levels. Search engines also appreciate content that is updated regularly.

Encourage interaction.

Get visitors to interact with your site and spend more time on it. Make a visit an interesting experience for them by including useful online tools, etc. Just make sure they are relevant to your site.

Personalize your site.

Depending on the technology you have available to you, it may be possible to greet visitors to your site by name and serve up content tailored specifically to their needs. If you can do it then do so.

Invite dialogue.

Give your customers the opportunity to contact you via email, online forms, a call-back/call-me facility, web chat, etc. Ask for their feedback via online surveys and feedback forms. Invite them to subscribe to a customer newsletter.

Acknowledge customer contact.

It is common courtesy to say ‘thank you’. Very little effort is required to set up an email auto-responder. When requiring customers to complete and submit a form, make sure there is a ‘thank you’ page or pop-up. It reassures the customer that you have received their communication and does not leave them wondering whether or not your site is working properly.

Make it a ‘seamless’ experience.

Aim to give customers the same level of service online as you give them offline. Your goal should be to facilitate the customer’s interaction with your company and allow them to choose how to do business with you. You know that customers are your most valuable asset and that retaining them is vitally important.

Give your customers support.

Reassure visitors to your site by providing elements such as help pages, FAQ’s, a site map, terms of use and a privacy policy. They will appreciate it.

Inspire confidence.

Ensure that your site works properly and its content is up-to-date. Check error messages make sense and forms and data entry fields are logical. Get someone to proofread your site and spot any grammatical and spelling mistakes. The quality of your site tells customers a lot about the quality of service they can expect from you.

Get to know your customers.

Learn as much as you can about your customers and the way they use your site (and, if you can, find out how they use your competitors’ sites). Then use this learning to improve your site and increase your return on investment.

The number of web sites is growing every day and now just about anyone can create one. If you want your site to stand out from the rest, plan it carefully and design it with your customers in mind. Far too many web site owners just do not bother.

About The Author

Christopher Smith is owner of YourSiteAssessed.com (http://www.yoursiteassessed.com/) and President of eNewsWriters, Inc. – a company which writes customer newsletters for businesses (http://www.enewswriters.com).

Local Web Design Company Offers Solutions to Creating First Website

If you're thinking about creating your own website -- but don't really know where to start -- you may want to check this out.

There is a local web designing company that can give you a complete solution to designing your first site.

As the internet continues to grow, getting your business or yourself more exposure is easier than you think.

Read More Article...

5 Basic Rules of web page design and layout

Your web site should be easy to read

The most important rule in web design is that your web site should be easy to read. What does this mean? You should choose your text and background colors very carefully. You don't want to use backgrounds that obscure your text or use colors that are hard to read. Dark-colored text on a light-colored background is easier to read than light-colored text on a dark-colored background.

You also don't want to set your text size too small (hard to read) or too large (it will appear to shout at your visitors). All capitalized letters give the appearance of shouting at your visitors.

Keep the alignment of your main text to the left, not centered. Center-aligned text is best used in headlines. You want your visitors to be comfortable with what they are reading, and most text (in the West) is left aligned.

our web site should be easy to navigate

All of your hyperlinks should be clear to your visitors. Graphic images, such as buttons or tabs, should be clearly labeled and easy to read. Your web graphic designer should select the colors, backgrounds, textures, and special effects on your web graphics very carefully. It is more important that your navigational buttons and tabs be easy to read and understand than to have "flashy" effects.

Link colors in your text should be familiar to your visitor (blue text usually indicates an unvisited link and purple or maroon text usually indicates a visited link), if possible. If you elect not to use the default colors, your text links should be emphasized in some other way (boldfaced, a larger font size, set between small vertical lines, or a combination of these). Text links should be unique -- they should not look the same as any other text in your web pages. You do not want people clicking on your headings because they think the headings are links.

Your visitors should be able to find what they are looking for in your site within three clicks. If not, they are very likely to click off your site as quickly as they clicked on.

Your web site should be easy to find

How are your visitors finding you online? The myth, "If I build a web site, they will come," is still a commonly held belief among companies and organizations new to the Internet. People will not come to your web site unless you promote your site both online and offline.

Web sites are promoted online via search engines, directories, award sites, banner advertising, electronic magazines (e-zines) and links from other web sites. If you are not familiar with any of these online terms, then it is best that you have your site promoted by an online marketing professional.

Web sites are promoted offline via the conventional advertising methods: print ads, radio, television, brochures, word-of-mouth, etc. Once you have created a web site, all of your company's printed materials including business cards, letterhead, envelopes, invoices, etc. should have your URL printed on them.

Not only should your web site be easy to find, but your contact information should be easy to find. People like to know that there is a person at the other end of a web site who can help them in the event that:

they need answers to questions which are not readily available on your web site;

some element on your site is not working and end users need to be able to tell you about it, and

directory editors need you to modify parts of your site to be sure that your site is placed in the most relevant category.
By giving all relevant contact information (physical address, telephone numbers, fax numbers, and email address), you are also creating a sense of security for your end users. They can contact you in the way that makes them feel the most comfortable.

Your web page layout and design should be consistent throughout the site

Just as in any document formatted on a word processor or as in any brochure, newsletter, or newspaper formatted in a desktop publishing program, all graphic images and elements, typefaces, headings, and footers should remain consistent throughout your web site. Consistency and coherence in any document, whether it be a report or a set of web pages, project a professional image.

For example, if you use a drop shadow as a special effect in your bullet points, you should use drop shadows in all of your bullets. Link-colors should be consistent throughout your web pages. Typefaces and background colors, too, should remain the same throughout your site.

Color-coded web pages, in particular, need this consistency. Typefaces, alignment in the main text and the headings, background effects, and the special effects on graphics should remain the same. Only the colors should change.

Your web site should be quick to download

Studies have indicated that visitors will quickly lose interest in your web site if the majority of a page does not download within 15 seconds. (Artists' pages should have a warning at the top of their pages.) Even web sites that are marketed to high-end users need to consider download times. Sometimes, getting to web site such as Microsoft or Sun Microsystems is so difficult and time consuming that visitors will often try to access the sites during non-working hours from their homes. If your business does not have good brand name recognition, it is best to keep your download time as short as possible.

A good application of this rule is adding animation to your site. Sure, animation looks "cool" and does initially catch your eye, but animation graphics tend to be large files. Test the download time of your pages first. If the download time of your page is relatively short and the addition of animation does not unreasonably increase the download time of your page, then and ONLY then should animation be a consideration.

Finally, before you consider the personal preferences of your web page design, you should consider all of the above rules FIRST and adapt your personal preferences accordingly. The attitude "I don't like how it looks" should always be secondary to your web site's function. Which is more important: creative expression/corporate image or running a successful business?

Source: http://www.grantasticdesigns.com/