There can be no website design without a well-defined concept and there can be no concept without keeping any eye out for the objectives of the website. Everything’s connected and it’s only an objectivity driven concept that lays the foundation of a successful website. Nowhere is this fact more relevant, than in a website selling products or services, also known as an ecommerce website. From an online business’s point of view, it’s of paramount importance that the website is designed to promote business growth. Each and every design component must be used in such a way that it converts website visitors into customers.

For everybody who is thinking about opening an online business and wants a website for this purpose, it’s important to note that rather than focusing on the kind of web pages to be designed; importance must be given to the kind of results you want to achieve with the design of the web pages.

A concept driven website that is designed to pull in target customers and improve sales figures is a product of systematic planning, creativity, expertise and attention to detail.  If the website needs to be objectives oriented, it needs to be an outcome of a cyclic process.

Let’s have a look at that process.

Focused Ideation

You must have a set of ideas for your business, in terms of the products/services you want to sell, online promotional endeavors, website visitors’ engagement, sales objectives, and many more. It is your ideas that will help you give shape to your website, and ensure that the website’s design satisfies all the objectives that you have set for your online business. Idea generation doesn’t happen out of thin air. For the right ideation, you will need to develop an understanding of your target market, the needs and expectations of your target customers and the current trends that can have a bearing on your online business model.

By ensuring that you have an in-depth understanding of the needs of your target customers and your market competition you will be able to give shape to a concept that perfectly aligns with needs of your business.

Building the Web Design Project

Once you have a clearly developed set of ideas, you need to give them proper direction, and allow them to come together to form an effective concept. While this is being done, you are actually building your web design project. This is the stage where all the project brainstorming happens and website designers create a wireframe design for your website. This is also the time when you will fine tune your designing concept and will be able to get a bird’s eye view on what your concept will look like when it takes the form of a website.

Website Design

The designers now get into the act. They are ready with the wireframe that has been vetted by you, their client. So, all they now need to do is fill the wireframe with the design components that work best for your chosen concept. An experienced website designer will always keep scope open for making changes to the design at a later stage and not use a design process that makes for rigid designing that cannot be changed. A design of a successful online business website has to be flexible.

Quantitative Analysis

Before your online business website goes live, the design must undergo a thorough quantitative analysis. Yes, a qualitative analysis is also a must, but that is largely subjective. What is more important is measuring the design’s potential to achieve your business’s objectives. There are various parameters that you can take into consideration for this purpose. The call to action button, their placement on the web page, their ability to catch the attention of website visitors, the website’s navigability, the website’s products details pages and its shopping cycle are all parameters whose consideration will help you analyze your website in a quantitative manner. If you don’t like what you see, you can always make changes at this stage. It’s never too late to do so. Remember, you are looking at a website driven by a core concept. Your quantitative analysis must adhere to this concept.

Learn from feedback

Now that you have a website that has aligned itself with your concept, means you have a potentially successful online business website on your hands. You have covered all your bases, but there is one thing that you still need to do. You need to keep track of the choices made by your website visitors and get their feedback. This will help you make further improvements to the design, if any.

This will take you to the first stage of the process, which is focused ideation. As mentioned earlier, the process of developing a concept driven website is cyclic. A concept can never be rigid and its strength lies in its fluid nature. This helps you as an online business owner to make changes to it and adapt to ensure that it meets the needs and requirements of your prospective and existing customers.

You will need to strategize your web design efforts. You should develop a crafted strategy that takes into consideration, the various factors that are going to have an effect on your website’s design. You need to, evaluate all factors, keep the best and discard the rest.  As somebody who wants a successful website design, it’s your responsibility to identify a web strategy that is going to make this a reality.

Define the purpose and the objectives

There are some websites that only provide information about a specific topic or subject. Their purpose is to provide knowledge and they don’t have any marketing aspirations. Is your website one of those? A majority of websites on the internet are marketing tools for businesses. Is your website an online marketing tool? There are other websites that are essentially online businesses and integrated with a shopping cart.  Are you looking at getting such a website designed for your business needs? The answer to such questions will help you clearly define your purpose.

Once, you have clearly outlined the purpose of your site, you now need to identify the objectives of your site. Ask yourself what you want your website to achieve.  In the case of informative website, all you might look for is website visitors, but in the case of an ecommerce website, your core objective is making sales.  Your objectives have a very important role to play when it comes to designing your website.

Strengths and Weakness of your Website

If you want a successful website design, it’s important that you are truthful to yourself. So, with all honesty, you must determine the strengths and weaknesses of your site. Even though you think, your website has the best concept in the world; it’s going to have its weaknesses. So, identify them and if you can, correct them at the strategizing stage itself. There are times when you want a website to integrate a certain feature to help meet its objectives, but this gives rise to certain weakness in the website, which needs to be ignored. The weakness cannot be helped. But, the fact that you know about it means you can take certain steps in the website design to negate its impact.

Put yourself in the visitor’s shoes

This is one of the more crucial steps of strategizing. You need to be able to think from your website visitor’s point of view. Think about how the website is going to come across to the website visitor. Will the website design impress the visitors? Will it be easily understood? Will it be able to deliver the message in a manner that creates the right impact? Keep asking yourself these questions to enable you to fine tune your web design strategy. Be completely user-focused when it comes to your website design. This is the stage when you will need to work out your layout and navigation strategy. The idea is to make things easy for your website visitors.

A well constructed website design strategy is all about questioning your concept all the time. This is the stage where you can keep correcting your web design ideas and ensure that they are more in tune with the purpose and objectives of the website.

When one says ‘custom built’, images of a perfect product that is tailor-made to fit the requirements of a user, are conjured up in our minds. When it comes to custom ecommerce, similar images come to mind, but they revolve around ecommerce solutions that have been developed keeping the needs and requirements of online shoppers in mind.

Businesses who are selling their products and services online have a real job on their hands. First, they need to market their products and services to their target audience and need to attract this audience, to their sites. Once that has been achieved, they now need to ensure that their website visitors buy products and services from their site. But this is not the end of it. They also need to guarantee a shopping cycle that is quick, convenient and secure.  This is only possible if a custom ecommerce solution is in place.

There are certain elements or qualities that define custom ecommerce. Let’s take a look at some of them.

Usability

When it comes to the development of an ecommerce solution, prime importance must be given to usability. Take for example the case of an ecommerce website. There are various aspects that determine the usability of an ecommerce website including the general user friendliness of the site, the convenience offered by the ecommerce shopping cart, the structure of the website, its security features and its navigability amongst various others. These aspects need to be customized to suit the needs and requirements of the target audience. Not doing so, will result in an unfriendly ecommerce site that users aren’t too excited about using, resulting in a loss of business for the merchant.

User Engagement

If ecommerce solutions do not engage a prospective customer, they aren’t going to be successful enough. This user engagement can be brought about through the addition of various features that interest the visitors and offer pertinent information about the products and services on the site.  These features could be in the form of product reviews, a customer’s forum, message boards, an ecommerce blog integrated with an ecommerce website, YouTube embedded videos or the integration of social media and many more. The options are immense and a client needs to identify those features that can help improve the overall user experience.

Custom Admin Panel

The needs of all online businesses are different. So, the admin panel of the ecommerce website needs to be customized to suit the intrinsic needs and requirements of that specific business. The needs of business owners also differ regarding the control of their ecommerce website. These and many other factors determine the composition of the admin panel and its features. Typically, a fully customized admin panels includes various modules such as, user management, products management, categories and sub-categories management order management, SEO management, payment gateway integration, product display and many more.

This is the kind of admin panel that gives authorized users complete control over the functionality of their site and they are able to add/edit/delete the product/categories/ content on the site from their admin panel. They can also update and/or modify their pricing through their admin panel. In a nutshell, using a custom admin panel, they can control all operations occurring on their website.

This is just an overview of some of the elements that make a custom ecommerce solution. There is no doubt that poor usability, user engagement and admin panel can kill your ecommerce business. So, customization and that too efficient customization is an absolute must. Otherwise users will be turned away from your site.

For many years, there was a certain kind of stagnancy that was seen in ecommerce websites. Most websites offered customers the same features and there was very little freshness in the development aspect. But, all this changed when merchants realized the importance of taking their ecommerce website to the next level. Custom web development emerged onto the scene and today, there is no doubt that ecommerce has taken a big step in the right direction.

Better Shopping Experience

The use of sophisticated shopping carts solutions such as Zen cart, X-Cart, PrestaShop etc have changed online shopping for the better. Ecommerce websites now have shopping cycles that are quicker and very convenient. Inconveniencing the customer is definitely not an option. Customization of shopping carts to suit the merchant’s intrinsic needs and requirements not only helps enhance shopping experience but also improves the sale of products and services.

Value Added Services

Online shoppers are looking for something extra from their online merchants. Whether it’s a promo-code or a product related discount or something else, custom web development enables the integration of value added offers and services into the ecommerce website. This has made online shopping more engaging and worthwhile to customers. You can get as innovative as you like, but customization helps your imagination turn into a real concept.

Wider reach of your business

Currency calculators, multiple languages, and more payment options are just some of the many ways how customization helps your ecommerce site gain acceptability across a wider target audience. Tailor-made web development solutions also help your site tap into emerging markets and establish a presence much before your competitors arrive onto the scene.

Customer loyalty through CRM

When was the last time, you actually thought of connecting with your customers through your ecommerce site? Selling your products and services alone isn’t going to help you establish your credibility and ensure customer loyalty. Integrating customized web applications for customer relationship management are the way forward. Such applications help you talk to your customers, understand their needs and requirements better, and ensure quick response. All this taken together, helps your online business rise in the estimation of your customers.

Better Control

Your ecommerce website must be a seamless integration of the process of selling and buying. There is a tremendous exchange of data happening and the proper control, disbursement and management of this data will determine whether your online business is a success or not. Another aspect of better control is more security. Online customers are going to share personal and financial information on your website. You, as a merchant, should ensure that such information is secure and doesn’t fall into the wrong hands. All this is only possible if you make sure that your ecommerce website is developed to give you better control of its various processes.

Gone are the days when customers were satisfied with just about anything that an ecommerce website offered them. If you want to stay in business, you need to offer them an ecommerce experience that meets their expectations and surpasses them. This is only possible through custom web development

Did you know 'Magneto' has now turned into a hero? Before you widen your eyes in disbelief, let me clarify. I am not talking about the X-Men villain. My focus of attention is the up and coming ecommerce platform of the same name.

It’s turning into a real here for small and enterprise businesses.

Knocking on the doors of Popularity

The future for Magneto looks very bright. It’s becoming the new buzzword amongst ecommerce website developers. In spite of, the availability of more popular ecommerce shopping cart platforms, Magneto is slowly but surely become the platform of choice for developers and businesses alike. The story of Magneto’s success can directly be linked to the success of the online businesses that are using this platform.

There is still a long way to go before it breaks the monopoly of some of the other open source shopping carts, but it’s getting there. Now, before you think, I am writing a promotional piece on Magneto, let me clarify that I just want businesses to make an informed decision while choosing Magneto or any other ecommerce solution.

Small Business Benefits

What are small businesses looking for, when it comes to an ecommerce platform? They are looking to make a mark with their products and services by harnessing the power of the World Wide Web. But, they don’t want to get caught up in its functional complexities.  Magneto offers a variety of modules, tools and widgets that ensure your business is run the way you want it to be run.

Here are a few Magneto features on offer that can help your business offer an improved shopping experience:

• Design that is category specific
• Customization of Search Results
• Professional Themes
• Choice of Shopping languages such as English, French, German etc
• Availability of store themes that are language specific
• An array of marketing and promotional offers

This is a very small sampling of the features on offer for small businesses. Choosing the features that best suit the requirements of your website, will help your business achieve the online success it’s looking for.

Enterprise Level Business Benefits

You need a powerful ecommerce platform to meet the demands and requirements of enterprise level online stores. Magneto’s robustness and a high degree of flexibility is the perfect choice in this regard. It offers online business merchants the scope of improving their sales and taking it to the next level. The eCommerce needs of large businesses are complex and only customization can offer a fruitful experience for both merchants and customers.

Magneto brings together the benefits of web enabled APIs, database and code-level access as well as, a choice of thousands of extensions that can help immeasurably in online store modification.

Magneto features for enterprise level businesses include:

• New Payment Gateways that promise enhanced security
• Gift Registry and gift options
• Order tracking every step of the way right from New to Complete
• Upgrading and downloading extensions with Magneto Connect
• Call Center Feature
• Enhanced sales and marketing through Customer Attribute Management

Again, these are just some of the many features developed by Magneto to improve the eCommerce experience of large businesses and their customers.

You must use it to your Advantage

In order to make the best use of Magneto, it’s important that specific features come together to make the ecommerce website better suited for accomplishing all business goals.  As a business, you need to take the help of Magneto experts for this purpose. It’s only expertise on the Magneto platform that can help you get the eCommerce experience that you are looking for. There are plenty of web design and development companies offering their services in this regard. Choose the company that best caters to your needs and requirements.