Fresh Design Solutions

Having an ecommerce website can help you earn an income online. There are a number of different payment gateways that you may choose to integrate such as Stripe, PayPal, Apple Pay etc. All of these have different payment terms and ways in which you will receive the money. It is vital that before you set your ecommerce website live, you have checked that the payment gateway is working as it should. You can usually put the payment gateway in to test mode to check it uses fake card numbers. This will allow you to completely check the check out process and also email notifications etc.

IF at all possible, it is advisable to do a real purchase via the system. You may set up a product that is only a pound or so to allow you to make the purchase through the site. This way you can see what happens to the money afterwards and how long it takes to hit your account. IF there are any issues that arise at this point you then have time to rectify them before the site is set live to the general public, which could save you a lot of hassle in the long run.

The graphics and photos you use on your website can have a huge impact on how successful it is. IT may be that you already have your logo but don’t have any other images to use when it comes to designing your website. You need to decide if you are going to buy stock images to use or if you want to use your own images. It may be that you need images for several places on the site such as the header image but also a gallery page or products page. You may decide to use a mix of stock images and your own to get the look you want.

It is important to remember quality over quantity when it comes to choosing your graphics. You should never use an image that is pixelated, poor quality or stretched. If you do not have good quality images of your own then I would highly recommend hiring a photographer. They will often charge around £150 for half a day which is usually plenty of time to get all the images you need. Before you hire the photographer it is always a good idea to have your website design planned out. This way you know what images you need and their placement on the site before you get started.  

If you use WordPress to design your website then you should make sure to take advantage of the many plugins that are available to enhance your site. WordPress comes with a number of basic themes pre-installed. You can opt to amend these themes, build your own from scratch or buy a prebuilt theme. Once you have your theme you can then add other plugins to the site to give you more features. Some themes will require certain plugins in order for them to work. Some of the plugins are free and others you will need to buy so be sure to check this when costing up the website.

ContactForm 7 is a great simply to use plugin. It allows you to add multiple contact forms or enquiry forms to your site and they can be easily customisable. You can also set up auto responders and change the structure of the email that you receive once the form is filled in.

Another great plugin is SEO Yoast or All in One SEO. Both of these allow you to quickly and easily set up the SEO information needed on each page and allow you to edit what the search engine sees.

In any business it is vital that you do plenty of market research in to your competitors. You need to be constantly accessing the situation to ensure that you are offering your visitors a reason to use you over and above anyone else.

It may be that you can offer your goods and service at a cheaper price, which will give you an advantage but you need to make sure that you advertise this and that the experience they have when on your website is a good one. You may have a better product or service or be more competitively priced but if your website under performs you may be missing out on a huge number of sales. One stat that you should be aware of is bounce rate. This tells you the number of people that have left your site without interacting with the page. If this number is high then it may be that there is something putting people off your site. For some pages this is ok such as a contact us page where they may just be looking for your phone number but on your home page, this could signal that something is wrong.

Using video is a great way to advertise and promote products on your website. They say a picture paints a thousand words so imagine what a video can do.

Before you delve in to creating videos think carefully about how many you are going to have and what they are going to be about. You need to make videos that people are going to find interesting and will want to watch.

Depending on your audience, most markets would rather watch an informative video about your company than scroll down a long page of text and therefore video advertising should be considered by businesses of all sizes and industries.

Creating a video of someone using a new product or to show how a service you sell can benefit your customers, will really help convert your enquiries into sales.  You may use these videos on your own website but then also chose to share them on some of the social media sites such as Facebook and Twitter.

Research shows that you only have around 5 – 10 seconds to capture your audience’s attention before they decide if they want to watch the rest of the video so it is vital that you open with something that will spark their interest and give them a reason to continue.

If your website was built a while ago then there may come a time when it needs to be updated. It may just be the design and layout that needs to be updating which may be able to be done relatively quickly. If you need to add or remove functionality from the website then this may take a little longer.

It is not good practise to make big changes to a website whilst it is live. You need to take a copy of the website and upload it on to a server so it can be worked on without affecting the rest the site.

You need to bear in mind that if something goes wrong whilst you are making changes to the site and it may mean that the you have to take your whole site offline or that parts of your site stop working without you realising.

It may be that some of the changes can be done through the CMS which you may be able to do i you have access to it. You need to be very careful when making changes through the CMS as this can sometimes cause issues and break the layout of the site.

If you have a business and would like to start selling your products or services online then you may wish to have an e-commerce website created. This will allow you to take payments for your goods or services through your website portal automatically. There are a number of different ways in which you can set up your e-commerce website. It may be quite straight forward or very complicated if your items have options or delivery prices change depending on area or item.

The cost for an e-commerce website varies massively from a few thousand pounds upwards of tens of thousands of pounds.

It is vital that you know exactly what you need your website to do and portray this to the design and development team that will be working on your site. If at all possible, write it all down so you can give them a copy to refer back to. Once you have gotten a quote from a company for the website it is a good idea to ask them for a detailed specification as this will allow you to check that they have included everything you need them to.