Web Design: January 2009 Archives

Every year or so, I look closely at search engine marketing (SEM) best practices for launching a redesigned site. Over the last four or five years, much of the advice has stayed the same. Today, however, I discuss some techniques that may have changed since the last time you launched a site update.

Rapid Crawling and Indexing

Launching a redesigned site can create a bumpy ride as old content moves to different locations. Assuming most of your pages are complete and ready for prime time, expediting the crawling and indexing of your new pages is the most important SEM-related issue to execute efficiently.

One easy way to do this is to include your new URLs in your XML site map feed the minute the new site is live. That's not new. But for over a year, Google has offered exceptionally flexible XML site map submission on which few sites seem to capitalize.

See the full story at: http://www.clickz.com/3632436

More than any other group of Website design professionals, Internet retailers spend the most time focusing on individual page elements. They do this for good reason; each and every change they make (even small changes) produce a big impact. Sometimes it's not always for the better. That's why understanding best practices goes a long way towards getting your enterprise in the black.

Chances are high that the first add-to-cart button you encountered didn't make much of an impression. It's likely you understood it's purpose and you took the pre-determined action set forth by the merchant - buy and move down the sales funnel towards order completion. But as more merchants came online and user attention and loyalty became more difficult to secure, merchants began to get creative. For some end-users, merchants went overboard and made broader influences on consumers purchasing behavior - sometimes in good way, sometimes not.

From this trend came elemental testing. And one element that is often tested more than any other is the Add-To-Cart button. When redesigning an add-to-cart button, the elements tested are often the visual design, the text/copy and usability. Let's first look at button text and how wording can influence user behavior, as well as some general design choices related to add-to-cart buttons.

See the full story at: http://www.websitemagazine.com/content/blogs/posts/pages/designing-better-add-to-cart-buttons.aspx

With the New Year underway, it's a perfect time to assess your Web shop, both in terms of web design and function, and give your e-business a marvelous makeover. Just like a bricks-and-mortar store needs an occasional paint job and some rearrangement of stock, so too does your Web site.

However, before you drag out Dreamweaver and start drooling over template web design, you need to think carefully about what you're about to do. You'll want the best results for the money and time you'll be spending on the upgrade. To help you out, here are my five top dos and don'ts to help avoid the angst caused by making a wrong decision when conducting an e-commerce site makeover .

See the full story at: http://www.ecommerce-guide.com/article.php/3794461