Avoid the 5 most common design mistakes.

Not planning

Planning is an extremely important part of developing a world class online store. You should think about how your customers will see you and how you are going to entice them to buy from you.

Map out your site logically before designing. Ashop Commerce will help with the clear category navigation design built into the software

Outdated Information

Once you have set up a great site, don’t just leave it to die. Your customers and the search engines understand if a site is left alone. It will affect your rankings and sales if you don’t change anything for a while.

Plan to add a page of fresh content to your site as often as possible. Google’s spiders show a preference to sites which add or update content daily.

Horizontal scrolling

Just because you may have a high screen resolution with your computers monitor, it’s doesn’t mean everyone does. The majority of internet users are still using 800 by 600 resolution screens. This means to see the whole website without scrolling left and right, your page table should be set to 780 pixels wide to fit perfectly including the vertical scroll bar.

Change your screen resolution, and take a look at the site in all of the available options that you have.

To do this:

1. Right click on your desktop.
2. Click Settings.
3. Move the Screen Resolution Bar to 800 x 600 and click ok.
4. Once your screen refreshed check for horizontal scrolling.

Slow loading time

Flash animation can make your site look fantastic but will loads of graphics really increase sales; No, only use high end graphics and flash animation if it has a solid purpose, use it to point to a sale or advertise a new product, don’t just add a nice graphic because it looks good.
Also, if it takes more that a few seconds to download you are pushing away potential customers.

Try to keep your web pages under the 100k mark. Test your site, check the time it takes to load from a dial-up account and remember a large number of your visitors are going to be accessing your site via a dial-up service.

Broken Links

Broken links diminish credibility. Check your site constantly.

Web design and site usability are major factors in e-commerce success and failure. Follow these guidelines to ensure you have a better chance for success.