The purpose of this blog is to illustrate in detail how to create a good shopping website especially the website that can maintain and attract customers.
A website is one of the tools that company or brand can sell their products, services, sharing its information such as the history, physical store location, latest news or price list etc., those are the fundamental things a website should have, however, if need to be a good shopping website, there are far more things need to be considered.
According to the Blue square management uploaded the video on Youtube about web design principles, valuable information, engagement and visitor conversion are the three principles to create a good website.
Regarding valuable information, valuable information should contain “who you are”, for example, what products does the brand selling. Information in simple keyword can definitely make home page clear and clean, and visitors can easily find out the content they want to look at. Moreover, the shopping website should encompass professional receptionist in live, and a live professional receptionist can help visitors to answer any question or specially request immediately without any further waiting, do not let visitor wait is a significant factor to maintain them. A detail contact page with email, phone number and social media account would give the visitor an opportunity to get in touch.
Engagement is about how does the brand make visitor land to its website. Every brand wants to keep visitor staying on their website for a long time instead of shutting it down in 5 seconds. Engagement such as visitor could control the website, play it, not the other way around. Adding more images or videos would be one of the attractive methods, Images or video clips can catch visitors more attention to the web.
Visitor conversion is the critical matter to the brands, and a good design website can actually convert visitors to customers. Optional opting in email pops up immediately when visitors land it in the homepage, the oping option could have it in every single page to remind visitor to sign up. That help to maintain the customer by receiving the brand’s latest email weekly, also can turn visitors who have not become customers when they first log in to the website into customers.
Furthermore, usability is quite important to the web. Usability is about how visitors can do on the website and how easy to use it. People can leave in any second if the website is getting them lost, also, “The first law of e-commerce is that if users cannot find the product, they cannot buy it either”(Nielsen, J., 2003).
In order to increase usability, websites should minimise the errors rate when visitors using the website. The errors such as payment error and information error, payment process need to check within a small period to prevent the error occur, information about products price need to be updated, An error defined as any action that does not accomplish the desired goal of the visitors (Jahn, M. and Frank, A.U., 2004).
However, there is a risk by those actions, especially Adding more images or video clips, that could increase the loading time on the page, Time taken has a huge impact on the interesting. There is an experiment that sums up the conclusion that long delays time produces greater frustration(Selvidge, P., 1999). Therefore, visitors would have a not fluently experiment and rather close the website if it takes too long to load the web entirely.
Those are how to make the website initiative work and how can make it better, besides with the risk of this initiative.
YouTube. (2019). Web Design Principles : What Makes a Good Website Design 2018. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ5GM2uYeLA [Accessed 1 Mar. 2019].
Nielsen, J., 2003. Usability 101: Introduction to usability.
Jahn, M. and Frank, A.U., 2004. How to increase usability of spatial data by finding a link between user and data. na.
Selvidge, P., 1999. How long is too long to wait for a website to load. Usability news, 1(2), pp.1-3.