2 March 2016

Web Design

The Do’s and Don’ts of Ecommerce: how to make your online business succeed

There are numerous amounts of businesses fighting to be heard over one another in the search engine loudness war of 2016. As search engine algorithms have evolved and become more complex over time, businesses and savvy marketing teams all follow the pursuit of working out the secret to designing and optimising online content in order to attain prestigiously high search engine rankings.

FDC Studio know how web design plays a huge part into a business’ success, with regards to both responsiveness and optimisation of content.

✔ DO - Design a site with fast page loading times
In 2016, us millennials are used to having all that we require at our fingertips with quick, effortless access and fast results. Pages which take longer than 3 seconds to load have a damaging impact on businesses, as research shows that customers get impatient and will seek alternate products or services on other sites.

✔ DO - Create a custom 404 error page
By designing a custom 404 error page, you can allow users to continue navigating through your web site by creating links to other sections of the website instead of simply acting as an online dead end and also allows for your content to be further optimised for search engines.

✔ DO - Add alt text to your images
Don’t just leave them blank! Add alt text to your images in order to allow search engines to understand and process image content, therefore allowing potential users to find your products or services online.

✔ DO - Build a fully-responsive web design
Search engine visibility is also now largely affected by the rising popularity of mobile devices and so businesses need to build responsive interfaces compatible with all devices in order to be found by potential users on search engines.

✘ DON’T - Let pop-ups affect visibility of content
Integrating pop-up advert content into your business’ web design can be a great way for businesses to self-promote their own products and services and has proven to be a more efficient and effective alternative to banner adverts by gaining their attention through temporarily halting the user’s actions.

However, if these pop-ups are designed to cover crucial web page content, your users could miss vital information which would have otherwise converted the user into purchasing your product.

✘ DON’T - Replace vital text content with images
Replacing textual content with images, flash content or java applets removes a search engine’s ability to recognise the content and is consequently ignored. Despite fancy designs and non-text interfaces being all the rage, ensure that the content you want to be read by search engines such as keywords are kept in text format.

The way your website is designed has an inevitably powerful effect on whether users who visit your site are converted into paying customers. FDC Studio are web design experts based in Leicester who help a number of small to medium sized businesses reach their goals in getting heard amongst the competition.

Our web design and ecommerce services aid our clients in generating greater profits through dynamic, fully-responsive web design and accurately optimised content for greater search engine visibility.