General e-commerce site guidelines

Before beginning to consider the specifics of creating your e-commerce site, you need to understand a little more about what your customers will be looking for when they visit. In essence, if you know what your customers want, then you can give it to them, which makes it far more likely that they will do business with you.
For the majority of people who spend money online, there is one factor that of all else dictates sites they buy from, and which they don’t. More than anything else, they want simplicity, and therefore ease of use and convenience.
While many new online entrepreneurs might be tempted to try to create an all-singing, all-dancing website that is flashy and complex, that is not what your customers are interested in. They want to know what you have to offer as quickly as possible, they want to know why they should deal with you, and finally, they need to know how they can do so.
It is important that the design of your site and the content on your homepage should grab your visitor’s attention, but it must do so in a positive way. It must be easy for visitors to navigate from your homepage to your internal pages (it should never take more than three clicks to get from the homepage to any page on your site), while getting back again must happen with one click.
Also, make sure that all of the information on your site is presented to your visitors in language that they will understand, rather than in business jargon. Again, it is all about making it easy for your visitors to use your site.
Give details on the homepage of who you are and what your business does. Make sure that the home page has a clearly evident site map, as well as links to other important internal pages such as your FAQ page, details of payment terms, delivery conditions etc.
You will need to have a catalogue of the products you supply somewhere on your site, and each of those products will probably have its own individual page so that you can give further information about what they do, why they are beneficial for the people who use them and so on. Once again, links to your catalogue should be clearly highlighted from your homepage, and each of the individual product pages should be linked to the short product description on your catalogue page.
If you are providing a 24-hour customer service chatline, then you should feature the chat utility on the homepage, as well as further contact details such as an e-mail address, telephone numbers and so on. Incidentally, if you list telephone numbers, I would advise that you
also include an indication of your time zone to deter people from calling in the middle of your night (especially if you’re working from home).
It’s always a good idea to include images on your site, because images break up large blocks of written text. This makes each page of your site easier on the eye, which in turn encourages people to keep reading. Images also encourage people to do business with you, because pictures of products on the individual product pages give potential customers far more idea of what it is you are selling.
Keep each individual image file size as small as possible, because the larger your graphics are, the slower your site will load. While this may not be a significant problem for anyone who has a reasonable internet connection, a slow loading site could be the reason why people who are still using dial-up net are not going to buy from your site.
Every page of your site should have a consistent look, so if your homepage uses specific header and footer graphics to give the page a certain appearance, every other page on your site should match that look. This is important, because a consistent appearance encourages your visitors to browse around your site without really noticing that they are doing so.
If however every page looks different, then this has an adverse ‘jarring’ effect which is likely to encourage visitors to leave rather than stay.