Following my article on Appearance, Usability and Search Engine Friendliness in Web Design where I discussed the importance of looking at the usability and search engine visibility of a website, I have received countless messages from visitors to thesitewizard.com asking me to review their website. While I do not have time to answer such requests individually, I decided that an article outlining some glaring usability flaws that I have found in a number of websites in general would be helpful. This article thus deals with the myths and fallacies commonly believed when designing a website to sell a product or a service.
Make It Easy for Visitor to Check Your Price List
Some websites try to hide the price list for their products. Some of these sites only display the price of the item after you hit the "Buy" or "Order" button, or worse, only after you have created an account on their site. Others have a price list, but bury the link to the price list somewhere deep in their site in a place not easily accessible from the main page or the products page.
I'm not exactly sure what the reason behind this is. Possibly, they think that if the customer does not see the price until they click the "Buy" or "Order" button, they will be more likely to buy the item. This reasoning is fallacious.
There are many types of visitors arriving at your site. Let's take the case of the window shopper. If they see something noteworthy on your site, they may make a note of the price so that they can return later if they want the item at some point in the future. If the price of the item cannot be easily found on your site, do you seriously think that they will thoroughly search the site just to find that elusive price tag? Or do you suppose that such a visitor will click the "Buy" button, just so that they can find the price tag at the end of the process somewhere? Or will they go through the bother of creating an account, revealing their personal particulars, just to find the price of an item?
Like the serious shopper, if they cannot find the price, they will simply go to another site. Remember: this is not a brick and mortar store we're talking about, where you need to take time and put in effort to travel to another store. On the Internet, your competitor is only a click away. And the search engines are more than happy to yield thousands of other sites selling the same type of goods or services as you. I realise that there are some brick and mortar stores (usually small concerns) who think that if they don't put a price tag, the customer has to find out the price from a sales person, who will then have the opportunity to persuade him/her to buy that item. Whether or not that is a good idea for a brick and mortar store (and I can think offhand of some types of customers that you will lose even there), it is a bad idea for a web store.
No matter how you look at it, every customer and potential customer will need to know the price of a product. Even the corporate customer buying for his/her company works to a budget. Making it difficult for your visitor to find the price list is a quick way to drive a potential customer away. As has been observed by many usability experts - the average Internet user has the attention span of a flea. If they can't find what they want within the first few seconds of glancing at your page, they will leave. And your competitors will be more than happy to attend to them in your place.
Provide Descriptions and Pictures for Your Products
I realise that the new web designer is beset with contradictory advice about how best to design their site. One set of such conflicting advice is the requirement to be brief and to-the-point so that you can catch that Internet visitor who will only give your web page a few seconds glance before deciding whether to stay or go elsewhere. Contradicting that is the requirement that you describe your products in depth and place pictures of your product, or screenshots if yours is a software product.
The best way to resolve this, I think, is to take a leaf from Amazon.com's book. For ev
Is Your Website Design Driving Away Your Customers? Some Basic Usability Tips for Commercial Websites
Seven Easy Ways to Annoy Visitors to Your Website: A Satire
1.
Place some (or all of) your content in a small frame and force your visitors to read the content through that window. Don't worry about what constitutes "small" here, since most of the time, even if you create a big frame, it'll be considered too small by most visitors. This trick has a high annoyance value since your visitors have to view the information through that small little box and scroll continuously to see the text while the rest of the browser window is filled with information they don't really want to read at the moment. With this strategy, visitors cannot resize or maximize the window to make their reading more efficient or pleasurable. This method will allow you to frustrate those hapless souls and, as a bonus, make them leave your site.
2.
Disable the right click menu of the browser. Nevermind that people need the right click menu for many purposes, and that they can access the same functions through the main menu bar even after you've disabled it. After all, if your aim is to annoy, you might as well make their visit to your site as unpleasant as possible.
3.
Play background music when they arrive at your page. If that's not enough of an annoyance, make sure you loop the music so that the visitors are plagued by it continuously while they are on your page. If you're feeling particularly sadistic, place automatically-playing music on many (or even all) pages of your site. You don't have to worry about choosing a horrible tune - choose your favourite piece if you like. Since one man's meat is another man's poison, any sort of music tends to annoy most visitors.
4.
Make every link on your site opens in a new window when your visitor clicks on it. That is, put a target="_blank" to every link. This will annoy visitors since every time they click on a link in your site, a new window or tab will open. Another benefit of this technique is that it makes your site look amateurish.
5.
Force your visitors to navigate your website using Flash. That is, place all your content in a Flash file - text, pictures, links, etc - even if Flash is not ideal for such content (a straight HTML page is best for those types of content). Make sure that visitors who don't have the Flash plugin enabled or installed cannot see anything or do much on your website. This effectively drives away all mobile users, a group of users that is growing in size, as well as cripple your visitors who have come to expect certain facilities to always be available in their browsers (such as the BACK key and the ability to bookmark specific pages) when they visit websites. Now they will be forced to work through the more limited Flash plugin of their browser with whatever subset of features you deign to provide. In fact, exclusively using Flash for your site content might even help you to drop to the bottom of search engine listings too, thereby reducing the number of visitors to your site. After all, if you don't have visitors, you don't have to think of new ways to annoy them.
6.
Load your site with pop-up windows that open when your visitor reaches your page as well as when they leave the page. In fact, if you want to annoy them even further, open a pop-up window when they click on links on your site.
7.
Reduce the navigational usability of your website. Don't put site maps or navigation bars with shortcut links to pages that your visitors will usually want to go such as the "Download" page if you're a software author. If you can annoy your visitors by forcing them to read whole pages of your text before they can find a link to move on to do what they really want to do, so much the better.
How to Use Different CSS Style Sheets For Different Browsers (and How to Hide CSS Code from Older Browsers)
In an ideal world, you only need one set of CSS style sheets for your website, and those styles will work with every browser currently being used. This, as every webmaster soon finds out when he/she uses CSS, is a pipe dream. The modern browsers all have uneven levels of implementation of the CSS standards. As though this isn't bad enough, their implementations are often buggy - and they don't share the same bugs! And when you have solved that tricky bit, you find that your site has certain visitors (often your best customers) who, for various reasons, are using older browsers that have only rudimentary support for CSS.
What most (if not all) CSS-using webmasters want is a way to specify that a certain style sheet is to be used by such and such a browser and not others, as well as to hide other style sheets from older browsers.
The Good and Bad News
The bad news is that there is no standard documented method to include or exclude style sheets from being used by every browser still being used on the Internet.
All is not lost however. The good news is that there are a number of tricks, workarounds and even non-standard but documented methods available that you can use to have your style sheet included by some browsers and not others. The workarounds often rely on known bugs in certain versions of specific browsers.
On the other hand, even with these workarounds and tricks, you will probably find that there are certain browsers that you want to code for but do not have any reliable means to detect and work around. However, at least with the help of the tips listed here, you should be able to design a CSS-based website that works with the most commonly used browsers
Preliminary Tips for Coding
Before you start coding your site using CSS for specific browsers, here are some tips that hopefully will make your life easier.
Design From Scratch
Most webmasters who have had to convert their existing website to CSS say that they find it easier to design their site from scratch in CSS than to try to find a way to reproduce their old layout in CSS.
Another reason for designing from scratch is that CSS allows you to do many things not possible using the old tables paradigm. Rethinking your entire design allows you to take advantage of the new possibilities.
Code to Follow the CSS Standards First
Many of the web designers hanging out in webmaster forums have found that it is far easier to develop their CSS code for a highly standards-compliant browser like Firefox first, and then only later add the workarounds to make their code work on IE, than to code for IE and then try to make it work for Opera, Konqueror, Safari and Firefox.
It is also logical to write for a more standards-compliant browser first: sooner or later, Microsoft is bound to issue a newer version of IE that will have the existing CSS bugs fixed. When they do so, all you have to do is to remove the workarounds which you created and you're done. If you write your main style sheet with styles that are coded in a non-standard way to deal with IE bugs first, you will wind up having to rewrite everything when Microsoft fixes the bugs.
This is not to say that Firefox does not have its own share of CSS bugs. As such, my personal recommendation is to code with the two (supposedly) most standards-compliant browsers first, ie, Firefox and Opera, while at the same time periodically making sure that your CSS code validates with the W3 Consortium's free style sheet validator. You can add the workarounds for IE later.
(If you are not sure what validation means, or how you can get it done, check out my article on HTML and CSS Validation: Should You Validate Your Web Page? at http://www.thesitewizard.com/
Use External Style Sheets and Take Advantage of the "Cascading" Aspect of Cascading Style Sheets
One way to handle the bugs and omissions existing in different browsers is to put all your standards-compliant CSS code in a separate (external) style sheet file that is loaded by every browser.
Then, when you find th
10 Strategies To Make Your E-Commerce Website A Success
E commerce websites have come of age. As customers realize the ease and benefits of online shopping, the popularity of e-commerce websites have soared like anything else. However, with the increase in the number of Ecommerce websites vying for attention, it has become important for them to devise strategies to be better than the competition and attract more traffic. Here are some new trends and techniques that can help your Ecommerce processes.
Focus on User Experiences
Often we concentrate so much on improving the usability of the website that we completely forget about the user experience. The way users feel on the website goes a long way in influencing their purchase options as well as their general perception of the website. Therefore, try to connect with the visitors on intimate level and then build up your branding through strategic marketing techniques.
Provide Customized Messages to Specific Audience Segments
The chances of sales increases when the audience is more targeted. When you segment your audiences, you know about their general common preferences and likes. This will also give you an idea about what segments are useful and most profitable. In turn, you can customize your sales message and make sure they receive more relevant and personalized information and offers.
Create Compelling Content
Content is the only source of direct communication with your website audiences. Therefore, make it as compelling as you can . The main objective of your product page should be sales conversions. Include product images and videos along with content that convinces them to hit the 'Buy' button.
Eliminate Unnecessary Page Elements
A majority of Ecommerce websites carry a bulk of undue weight because of unnecessary page elements like blinking banners, rotating graphics and annoying flash-animations. Attention grabbing works best on subtle levels. Also make sure the information you provide on the website is short and crisp.
Include Videos on the Website
Videos are an emerging source of product promotion with more and more website embedding videos on their websites to promote their businesses. You can upload videos that provide demonstrations of your products and show how they work, exhibit their different features and show how users can benefit from their use. Moreover, video inclusion has certain search engine benefits as well.
Involve your Website Audiences
The three main elements of a successful website are - Content, Communication and Commerce. You need to involve your audiences and make them feel that they are a part of the website. Include a form on audience interaction on your website. Provide them with an option to review the products and participate in forum discussions etc.
Provide Free Shipping Options
A little known secret of the e commerce industry is that shoppers often shy away from buying a product because of the additional shipping costs that are involved. Thus if you decide to waive of the shipping costs, you'll have more sales. If its not a profitable option individually, provide free shipping options for bulk orders.
Optimize Products for Local Searches
While it is great to business on a global scale and cater to international customers, you can get huge visitor traffic with localized search engine marketing. Promote the products on your website on domestic search engines. You can also customize your product descriptions, tutorials, public relations and ad campaigns to suit the tastes of the local markets.
How To Enhance The Usability Of Your Homepage Design
The homepage of your website is the face of your online presence. It is what makes the first impression on online audiences about your company and business. When people type in the URL of your website, they reach your homepage. The homepage, should therefore present a brief introduction about the website and lure visitors to browse further within. The homepage is perhaps the most important page of the website and thus you need to take adequate measures to enhance its usability. Here are some tips to ensure the same.
Include a Crisp and Catchy Tagline
Draft a tagline for your website homepage that informs about the company and business in a simple sentence. When visitors enter the homepage, they should know what the website and the company is all about just by reading the tagline. In fact, by drafting a catchy tagline you can catch the attention of your visitors and make sure they don't forget you.
Draft a Meaningful Title Tag
The title tag of your homepage should have your company name followed by a very brief description of the website. Avoid using words like 'Welcome' or 'The' that just populate the space and do no value addition. Instead, try to include your relevant keywords and phrases in the title tags.
Cluster All Corporate Information
Website visitors generally don't bother reading about the company. However, there are times when they decide to do business with you only after they are convinced about the company. In such scenarios it is important to have good corporate information on the website. Create an About Us page on your website that is dedicated towards informing visitors all about your company and business and provide a link to it from the homepage.
Focus on Key Tasks of the Website
The homepage of your website should act as a guide for visitors and help them find a browsing route. It should provide a clear starting point to do what they want to do i.e. there should be clear links to the main areas of the website where visitors might be interested in going.
Include a Search Box
The search box is indispensable for any website. Internet users are an impatient lot and they love anything that cuts short the action steps. Search boxes enable visitors to search for the exact information that they need by just entering a query instead of browsing through categories to fins what they need. Make sure your search box is at least 25 characters wide so that it accommodates multiple queries.
Offer Snapshots of Inlying Content
The homepage of the website is where you can showcase things and lure visitors to further explore the website. A good idea is to place snapshots or post the topics of important content within your website. Whether it is a recent article or a report that you have on a certain web page, offer a preview on the homepage.
Use Meaningful Design Elements
The homepage of a website is important and should welcome visitors. However, that doesn't mean you can load the page with useless design elements and flash animations that offer no value but only increase the file sizes.
Kabir Bedi is the senior web consultant at LeXolution IT Services, a reputed offshore web development company that provides an extensive range of web design services and web Development services. He has completed several international web design projects for international clients.
Here's a different way to generate forms using PHP, and to take care of all the required field validation too. It might help someone:
array(
"type"=>"select",
// attributes are an associative array
"attributes"=>array(
"mr"=>"Mr.",
"ms"=>"Ms.",
"miss"=>"Miss.",
"mrs"=>"Mrs.",
),
),
"first_name"=>array(
"type"=>"text",
"size"=>40,
"required"=>true,
"onclick"=>"alert('test');",
"style"=>"border:2px solid #CCCCCC; padding:4px; font-size:15px;",
),
"last_name"=>array(
"type"=>"text",
"size"=>70,
"required"=>true,
),
);
$errors=array();
if($_REQUEST['save']){
// do sql here...
$sql = "INSERT INTO foo SET insert_date=NOW()";
foreach($elements as $element_name => $el){
if($el['required']&&!$_
$errors[]="Required field missing: $element_name";
}else{
$sql .= ", `$element_name` = '".addslashes($_REQUEST[$
}
}
if(!$errors){
// call sql:
// $res = query($sql,$db);
// $member_id= mysql_insert_id($db);
// redirect after post back
header("Location: example.php?member_id=$member_
exit;
}
}
global $elements;
function fb($elem){
global $elements;
$el = $elements[$elem];
if(!$el['name'])$el['name']=$
if(!$el['value']&&$_REQUEST[$
switch($el['type']){
case "textarea":
?>
$val){ if($key=="value")continue; ?> ="" >
$val){ ?> ="" >
$val){ if($key=="attributes")
- select -
$val) {
?>
selected >
Salutation:
First Name:
Last Name:
First name and last name are required fields. Try clicking save without filling them in.
View codin reference to: required field validator in php - Google Search (view on Google Sidewiki)