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Tips to make your website better

Web Design Malaysia — Wed, 27 Mar 2013 00:33:27 +0000

Want a better website and don’t know where to start? Or, do you think your website changes are out of your control?

Many website owners think a better website means a complete overhaul – a brand new website. In some cases that may be true, but in my experience a couple tweaks can make the difference between bland and beautiful.

There are hundreds of things you could be doing. But, I want to take you beyond just spell-checking your site for errors.

Here are 17 ideas you can put into action right now:

1. Condense your menu

Do you have twelve items under one heading on your navigation bar? If so, you might want to look at tidying up. A cleaner navigation makes things easier to find. When things are easier to find, it creates a better experience for your site’s visitors. Plus, they’ll be less likely to hit the back button because they won’t be frustrated trying to find what they need.

Beautiful menu from website TRUENORTH

2. Have a call to action on every page

Every page on your website should be making your visitor act on something. Maybe it’s to get them to purchase your ebook, view your credentials, or watch a demo video. Whatever it is, make it known to the user. Remember, they don’t want to think when they’re browsing your site. Whether it’s a button or a hyperlink, but something on every page that leads them to the action you ultimately want them to take.

3. Put your phone number on your homepage

Every website should have their phone number. Seems obvious, right? But, many don’t. It’s often buried on a contact page or not on the site at all. Big mistake! Many visitors head to your website just to find your phone number, so make it prominent on your homepage. The top right corner is usually best – or, I’ve also seen it down in the footer. Regardless, put it up there!

Image from Emir Ayouni

4. Add business hours

Similar to the phone number above, when is your business open? Can I call you at 6am? What if I’m bringing my parents to your restaurant and it’s 10pm – will we be able to eat? These questions are inside the head of your customers more than you think. Making your hours known solves this, so put them up for all to see.

5. Add an about us page

Who are you? Do you work with a big team? When a business person – or consumer – selects a company to do business with, they often like to know who they’ll be working with. Add pictures of your team with real bios. Sure, professional experience is awesome, but list your hobbies, family life, and things you like to do for fun. Bottom line: show you’re a real human being.

About page from Mostly Serious

6. Use big, bold images

This seems to be a pretty big trend in web design, but it’s because images speak louder than words. Capture your visitors with beautiful imagery. Take pictures of your team in action, shots of the local area, or recent projects you’ve worked on.

7. Add a directions widget

For those without a GPS, directions are convenient for just about anybody. Google has a free map widget you can add to your site. Just enter your address and you’ve got directions right to your front door. It shows prospective customers you care about the whole experience.

Image from Dash

8. Make your site mobile-friendly

Mobile is huge right now. With over 50% of Americans owning a smartphone, your new customers are likely to come from mobile browsing. But, it’s tough to navigate a site not optimized for a tiny screen. There are plenty of inexpensive tools to create a mobile website from your current site. Explore those or get a designer to make your site mobile-friendly.

9. Match your company branding

Did you just update your logo or change your company colors? Make sure your brick and mortar experience matches your online experience. It helps to create brand awareness so customers recognize your company when they’re on the road or describing it to colleagues.

10. Cut the distractions (ie. music and splash pages)

Do you have Frank Sinatra playing on your site, or a splash page that blocks people from getting to what they need? Remove it all. Why? Not only is it annoying for many visitors, but it distracts them from doing what you want them to do.

11. Get social with your customers

Haven’t hopped on social media yet? These days, it seems like the entire world is on social media in some way. We’re social people who like to interact with friends, family members, and even strangers. Plus, we listen to their recommendations. You want in on this community building. Get started with a Facebook page or Twitter account and focus on mastering one of them. Then move to the next network.

Image from Visual Idiot

12. Add industry resources

Want to establish yourself as the company to go to in the industry? Then add some resources to your website. This could be reports, surveys, white papers, or helpful links. This material demonstrates to prospective customers you know your stuff. So, get writing!

13. Put your customers to work – add testimonials

Your current customers are a huge asset to your company because they can provide real-world case studies – and testimonials – as to how your company has helped them save time, save money, etc. Reach out to your best customers and ask for a testimonial. Here’s a tip: have it pre-written, so all your customer has to do is approve it.

14. Figure out your site’s main goal

Why do you have a website? What do you want your site to do? After you figure out these two questions, make sure your website accomplishes the goal: add or delete pages, restructure your site, make a new landing page, etc. Make your goal a top priority. And let your team know what that goal is so they can help out too.

Image from Riley Cran

15. Start from scratch

While this isn’t recommended because it takes a lot of time, money, and resources, it may be worth it. If you’ve got an old website, starting over with brand-new technology would be smart, rather than trying to patch what you already have. Start with a pencil sketch of what you want and assemble the best team to make it happen.

16. Hire a professional

This leads me to hiring a professional. If you’ve kept your web work in-house, it may be worth looking at bringing in the big guns. They’ll not only move the project forward, but they’ll bring their own experience and expertise to the project.

Again, there are more than 17 tips to a better website, but this should be a good start for you. Pick
a couple and make the changes to your site – or have a developer/designer do it for you.

Best of luck taking your website to the next level!

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Beautiful Single Page Web Designs

Web Design Malaysia — Mon, 25 Mar 2013 02:02:04 +0000

The single page web design trend is getting more and more attention from designers, today we decided to show you some inspiring examples of websites that have all their content in a single page.

Colourco.de

Pixel Lab

A Viagem Autonomica

Freesbie

Night Contact

Milk and Pixels

Chris Connolly

Atmosphere Maps

Webflow

Minimal Monkey

Other Icons

Bioipsum

Festa Italiana

Frismedia

Jon Rundle

The Twelve

Every Last Drop

Ian James Cox

Carlos Sousa

Grooveshark

Hungree

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Responsive Web Designs Useful Tools

Web Design Malaysia — Sat, 16 Mar 2013 01:31:17 +0000

Creating a responsive web design goes way beyond arranging things in a way that won’t compromise the look of your website in different screen sizes. Even tough we talk a lot about responsive web design, we are all figuring out the best way to go about developing a responsive site. One of the best ways to approach the issue is checking out tools that may help you with the task. However, there are a lot of tools out there, and it can be difficult to sort through them all. So for this post, we gathered some of the ones we find the most useful.

Responsive Web Design Sketch Sheets

Adobe Edge Inspect

Foundation

RWD Calculator

Responsive Layouts, Responsively Wireframed

Adaptive Images

Bootstrap

Retina Images

SimpleGrid

The 1140px CSS Grid

resizeMyBrowser

The Responsinator

The Responsinator helps website makers quickly get an indication of how their responsive site will look on the most popular devices. It does not precisely replicate how it will look, for accurate testing always test on the real devices.

Some books on responsive web design:

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Building interesting and worthwhile websites

Web Design Malaysia — Mon, 04 Feb 2013 12:47:25 +0000

As the lines blur between Web Design, CRO, SEO, UX, UI, Content, and other disciplines there’s one thing that’s central to them all. Your website.

We all know that on site activities like reducing bounce rates and increasing time on site as well as off site factors like social sharing and links are all important if not crucial to your online success.

There’s so many opportunities to help encourage all of them, sometimes with very little effort, that I wanted to demonstrate some ways you can immediately benefit your site without having to rebuild or redesign it.

By making your site ‘interesting’ you make it (more) linkworthy. I’ve tried as much as possible to stay away from ‘content’ suggestions though naturally some thing overlap with content to an extent.

If you think of any other great examples then please add them to the comments to help everyone else!

Utilise Typically Boring Site Pages

People pages

Liven up your people page with unique insights into each staff member. Jellyfish do something similar in a fun and quirky way using cartoon overlays on rollover. It becomes quite addictive to see what each one will do which engages the user and increases time on site. Also fun to share.

Distilled do something along the same lines but with alternative quirky photos.

Privacy and Terms & Conditions pages

This opinionated lawyer has a unique privacy page. Yours doesn’t have to be controversial but you could easily inject some personality into it with images and build trust by abandoning all the legal jargon and using honest, reassuring promises in plain language for your users.

404 pages

The NME site is currently featuring Dave Grohl on their 404 page and I’ve seen a few people Tweet the link. We can’t all feature celebrities but you could promote a featured product, team member, recent project or company values with your dead space.

Or why not engage your users instead of sending them back to the site with an interactive game on your 404 page like this site did with a variation on the classic game Lemmings.

About Us pages

37 signals does a nice job on their about us page combining a visual timeline of the company history, their milestones and achievements, it gets the key people and products mentioned and portrays the company personality all in one go.

Recruitment pages

Stand out against all the other companies wanting to hire the best and also make the page more shareable by being different and interesting. This page on the Inflection site is both compelling and visually appealing.

Contact pages

Give your contact page a unique twist. On the Fixel site you can swap the faces of the designers with that of a giraffe. Weird but fun and addictive. If you scroll down, the designers are then represented with silhouetted facial hair along with their contact details.

Custom footers

Normally footers have the usual boring copyright and legal information and some useful site links. Why not reward a users who’s bothered to scroll right through your page with a tangible benefit like an offer or just with something fun and unexpected like this illustrated footer on Urban Pies.

E-Commerce Examples

Crazy or Excessive Products

Firebox, the gadget gift site, do this very well with a ‘WTF?!’ product category featuring Flying Hovercrafts, a Replica Batmobile, Jetpacks, an Electric DeLorean and the World’s Most Expensive Vacuum Cleaner amongst others.

Fake products

This example on Wish.co.uk of a 10 Downing Street experience day sprang to mind. Fake products have been done before, and will be done again, and when done well always attract attention. Note the FB and Twitter shares on the page are sitting at around 700 and 500 respectively.

Controversial Checkout Process

Last year, Kogan, an Australian online electronics dealer, began imposing a “tax” on customers visiting its site using Internet Explorer 7. The news page got thousands and thousands of Likes and Tweets and featured on news sites like the BBC.

Demo your products in a silly but useful way

Millican is a quirky site selling bags & travel accessories. Rather than just show you mages of bag they demo them in an almost silly but very useful way by filming them being packed with ridiculous amounts of stuff.

Interesting models

Why not use interesting, controversial or unique models in your photo shoots. Tattoos aren’t exactly controversial anymore but Need Supply often use tattooed models for product shots.

Forget you’re a shop!

Slam City is a skateboard shop, but they sponsor a bunch of skateboarders, do a ton of interviews, videos, etc. & they don’t do that for links or shares, they do it because they think it’s good. They probably get a lot of links/shares as a side-effect. Genius.

Customer product shot contributions

Black Milk achieve this beautifully by letting customers add photos of them wearing a product on Facebook accompanied by a specific hashtag. The submissions are then pulled into a gallery on the product page like below on the Artoo 2.0 dress.

Useful gamification

Allow users to play with or ‘try on’ your products by gamifying the process. H&M have a virtual dressing room that lets you choose your character, dress them up and then buy or share the results.

3D product creation

Enabling users to create their own products then view them in 3D is fun and engaging and whether or not they end up buying the product it just begs to be shared socially. This process is optimised by Foldable.me.

Let users test drive products

Some things are fun and easy to buy online and others not so much. Then again some people hate buying glasses in store too. Specsavers lets you virtually try on any glasses by simply uploading a photo then choosing frames and colours to see how they’ll look.

Company Transparency

Warts and all

How about letting everyone see right inside your company’s inner workings. It’s simple yet very effective to do what Huit Denim did and have a live webcam of your factory and processes for all to see.

Publicise bugs and complaints

Instead of trying to cover up customer problems how about make them all public like Naked Wines do. Not only will other customers see you help but it builds trust very quickly with potential customers.

Let your customers see you during interactions

Schuh, the footwear site, have a live support chat that let’s you see the support agent you are dealing with on a webcam. They can’t see you so it’s not an intrusive service but it’s a nice reminder it’s an actual person helping you.

Be personal

Freeagent, the online accounting software, have an amazing support team. We use Freeagent so I’ve experienced them a few times. I love that on their support page it shows you the members of the support team and their names. Nice and personable. Stock photos worked in 1996. Nowadays, not so much. How many companies can that 1 girl with the headset work for and who really has a globe in their office to point at?

Be the real, authentic, you

Love this site. You might have seen Ling on Dragon’s Den with her car leasing business. Her personality and marketing were eccentric and different but instead of trying to hide that away or change them to fit a persona the site just played on it and embraces her completely. Don’t try to fake it, people will know when you are being yourself.

Include your pets

Lots of companies have dogs that come to the office with workers or satellite staff might spend all day with their companions. People love animals so feature them on your site and let your audience get to know them. Web agency Nclud include their pets on their people page like loveable Floyd Günther below.

Do it live

Annoyingly I couldn’t find the example I wanted to use. There used to be a stunt kite maker who you could watch building your custom kite on Ustream. That was very cool. Tattoo sites could use this to great effect too. I could imagine a lot of outgoing people telling their friends they could watch them being tattooed and giving out the link then screenshots and the url flying around Twitter and Facebook all day.

Geek Section

Have fun withyour source code

Lots of companies have used ASCII fun in their website’s source code to great effect. Coca-Cola, Obama and Tumblr all had ASCII versions of their logos in their source code recently generating lots of links and mentions.

Easter Eggs

Die hard fans of your brand and geeks will love this and it will generate a lot of chatter. Dante’s Inferno hid ASCII art on lots of popular website to generate a buzz around the game.

Topical Elements

You could adapt elements of your site based on the date, season or important event relevant to your market. Probably the best known version of this would be Google adapting it’s logo to a Google Doodle to mark important dates. Every time they use an interactive one I see it talked about all day on Twitter.

Games within your site

You could have a treasure hunt within your site, or in Heart Internet’s case, a Zombie Hunt. Genius if you think about it. Fun. Increases page views and time on site. Have promo content on the pages you know they’ll have to see to progress. Capture email addresses to announce prizes. And ZOMBIES!

Konami Codes

The Konami Code, is a cheat code that appears in many Konami video games. Many website incorporate hidden content behind the code being entered. Google Reader makes some Ninjas appear. The sequence of the code which is most popularly used on websites is the following (directions are performed using arrow keys):
Up Up Down Down Left Right Left Right B A

Robots txt file

Why not have some fun with your robots txt file like on http://explicitly.me/robots.txt it combines ASCII art, a story and humour to create a linkworthy geeky resource.

Beautiful typography

It’s easier than ever to break away from the limited range of traditional web fonts and include customer fonts on your site by using 3rd party services like Google Fonts. Barcamp uses fonts beautifully to help enhance the character of the design.

Beautiful websites using HTML5

Web Design Malaysia — Fri, 18 Jan 2013 09:38:14 +0000

After all the buzz involving the HTML5 CSS3 duo, it is nice to check how websites are using all the good practices you can get from HTML5. When the buzz around the subject started, we could see a lot of websites totally animated. Now, after all the benefits of HTML5 settled, we can see websites taking advantage of it to create smooth transitions, nice image sliders and subtle animations. It is interesting to see the evolution of practices in this matter and that is why today we gathered some examples of websites using HTML5. Enjoy!

Zipper Galeria

Magic Leap

The Good Man

Shiftbrain

Oscar Charlie

Handy Test

redstamp.ca

The Trip

WebKnit

Jib

Pierrick Calvez Studio

I Shot Him

Mode87

Studio 1 Architects

Let’s Travel Somewhere

iconmonstr

National Academy Museum

Fat Media

Kalixo

Ciroc Mixology

Networking Providers

Best web designs of 2012

Web Design Malaysia — Wed, 02 Jan 2013 16:40:10 +0000

First of all, we would like to wish a Happy New Year to all of our readers! And to start 2013, we decided to gather some of the most appreciated designs we showcased here in 2012. We gathered the designs our readers most talked about, and we did this huge list to show you what we and our readers considered the best web designs of last year. The sites we will show here were featured because of use of textures, images, typography, navigation and much more. So take your time and browse through these designs to see what was memorable in 2012.

Captain Dash

Inzeit

Trent Walton

Postable

Pulp Fingers

The Buffalo Lounge

Designing Monsters

Pursuit Pop-Up Shop

shoplocket

Denise Chandler

Oliver Russell

Whiteboard

Bones Brigade DJs

Fifty Three

Fifty Three – Paper

Whitmans New York

Blind Pig Design

my own bike

Book of Beards

Simon Foster

Everything you need to know about Design

Modo Luce

BigNoise

Fudge House

Teacake

Luke Stevenson

open121

RED

Yardsale

Theory

D10studio

Lift Interactive

coderwall

Fear the Grizzly

FoundryCo

Kirschner Brasil

Roundhouse

Paid to Exist

Barcamp

O3

Diehl Group

Studio Airport

These are Things

Impress A Penguin

CIRQ.

Colorkite

Noble Design

Squarespace

Design Week Portland

Rule of Three

Sanctuary T Shop

fe-el

Studio Airport

Philip House

Eighty3 Creative

by association only

Mosaic

Ideaware

Nudge

Roy Barber

Tapmates

Young Jerks

Welikesmall

Grain & Mortar

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Beautiful Use of Images in Web Design

Web Design Malaysia — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 01:12:10 +0000

Have you noticed that lately the use of images in web design is getting very popular? More and more, we can see that images are being incorporated in designs in an inspiring way, and the result can be spectacular. When properly edited and positioned, an image can give a design a nice and elegant look, as the examples we gathered here today. From huge images as backgrounds to small thumbnails and headers, we will see several great examples of how to incorporate images in your projects in a beautiful and inspiring way.

Matthew Carleton

Ideaware

Wantful

Mosaic

by association only

Eleventh Edition

Meet Olly

Nucoco Chocolate

Sheree Hannah

insomnia coffee co.

Aspect Photography

Sweet Basil

Flywheel

Tiny Factory

IdeaKites

Space Box

The Funtasty

Userbrain

Joanna Laajisto

Pirata

Giorgio 1958

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Creative print advertisement designs

Web Design Malaysia — Tue, 20 Nov 2012 01:21:34 +0000

Being able to put together beautiful typography is important for every designer. Being able to distinguish the difference of type, where type is a set of characters and typography is the art of arranging type in beautiful ways. A good way to get typographical inspiration is browsing other designers work. In all media the challenge is the same, deliver something that will get users attention and will have an impressive visual. With that in mind, today we gathered some nice examples of type in printed ads to inspire you.

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Is your ecommerce web design effective?

Web Design Malaysia — Sat, 10 Nov 2012 04:14:08 +0000

When you want to buy a present, do you go to the mall or shop online? More and more, people are skipping a trip to the mall for a fast and comfortable online experience.

The goal of an e-commerce site is to lead a shopper to complete 1 task — purchase an online product. As a designer, we need to hook customers by making this process as simple and enjoyable as possible.

Here are a few important things to remember while creating an e-commerce website design.

Next-generation Deal of the Day site

Make the shopper feel comfortable

Simple test… where would you prefer to go shopping: a market that looks like this:

Or a mall that looks like this:

Shopping on the Internet is similar to going to the mall. We prefer clean, well-organized spaces where products are easy to find.

Translating this to online shopping, we can create the same type of organization with these features:

Navigation: stays the same on each page and accessible
Search bar: needs to be easy to use and accessible
Product categories: group and organize products so they can be easily discovered
Product information: needs to be detailed, readable and well-structured
Contact information: make it easy to find in case you have a frustrated customer with questions
Store rules: ideally links from the main menu and/or footer

A lot of the features above aren’t neccassarily in the designer’s control. However, it’s your job to implement ergonomic typography and to structure information in a way that makes it easy to understand.

Balance site quality with site speed

Here is a request designers often hear from developers: “Can you please make it smaller?”

There’s a theory that users will get discouraged waiting for store pages to load, and each “loading” second means another customer is lost. In my opinion, this is not exactly what happens. In some cases, it’s more important to keep the quality of photos high and accompany them with impressive graphics, even if they do take a few seconds longer to load.

This doesn’t mean it’s okay to have a site load slowly, but adding a few seconds is okay as long as you make the wait worthwhile!

Take Converse for example… they have a slightly slower load time but accompany it with quality images of their products.

Avoid a frustrated customer by showing the % left to load on the wait screen.

Make sure to place emphasis on the products rather than the crazy design. Avoid unnecessary elements that don’t have a lot in common with the marketed product.

Decide on a light or dark color scheme

Studies show that light color schemes tend to sell better than dark ones. One could find many reasons for this: light means life, it inspires confidence and joy, releases our energy, and makes us more willing to BUY.

In my experience, even if a customer likes a dark design, they end up choosing a lighter version. As humans, we get better vibes from lighter spaces than dark ones.

iPads: Consumer Electronics

It’s important to research your competitors. If you notice a trend — i.e all competitors use the color brown — there has to be a reason for this and you will need to investigate why.

There are many more brand specific stereotypes for color use. For example, light green and blue are commonly used for health and pastel colors are commonly used for children’s brands.

Nonetheless, those stereotypes are just that: stereotypes, and deciding if one works for your site design is a part of the research process. Anything that can be extracted directly from the brief always takes precedence over stereotype concepts.

Every rule can be broken and this applies to the light color rule as well — a dark background may just work for your company.

Focus on lifestyle brand building

Many brands are lifestyle brands — they embody specific cultures, demographics, values and aspirations of a group for marketing purposes. They engage customers emotionally and socially through events like store parties. So how does this translate to online stores?

Designing an e-commerce site isn’t just about making a nice, usable interface for database orders. Selling a product (especially a high-end product) means targeting and hooking a specific user. And that involves creating an atmosphere that reflects their specific lifestyle.

This client wanted to have a wonderland feel, as you can see with the bunny, cards, owl, etc.

It’s also important to show a brand’s lifestyle by linking to the company’s networks: Facebook, Pinterest, Tumblr, Google +, Twitter, Blog, etc. Today, these platforms are being used more and more and really help show a company’s opinions and trends.

Free People – Social Networking.

In short, build brands by:

Researching: what lifestyle does a specific product project, what are the competitors, what’s the target group and its culture
Creating an atmosphere: stimulate your imagination, be creative and be aware that your design is building a brand
Linking social networks: incorporate links in a way that would grab attention and make you want to click
Highlighting advantages: show how this site is better to shop than other stores

Emphasize the shopping cart

A virtual shopping cart should be instantly recognizable and easy to find. Intuitively, you’d search for it on the top right section of page. But it can be placed anywhere as long as it’s still visible and easy to recognize.

The standard location for a shopping cart is on the right top of a web page.

An attractive cart icon can improve usability. There are plenty of ways to be creative with a shopping cart, like incorporating it into the logo or stylizing it in a humourous way.

There are cases when no shopping cart is necessary (i.e. when 1 product is being sold). The example below is a unique solution that proves every rule can be broken.

There is 1 product so a cart would only add unnecessary complexity to the ordering process.

Additionally, make sure your cart counts the shipping price as a shopper adds to it. Also make sure to give as many payment options as possible — like PayPal, credit cards, wire transfers, etc.

In conclusion

While it’s often difficult to verify the effectiveness of some web pages, the effectivness of an e-commerce site is immediately evident.

Success means more orders and more satisfied, returning customers. So make sure your customer is taken care of on all levels: front-side aesthetics, comfortable user panel and community related features.

Source

What are the must have ecommerce features?

Web Design Malaysia — Thu, 18 Oct 2012 14:56:50 +0000

There are hundreds of ecommerce platforms that online merchants can choose from. The differences between these carts can be significant, so knowing what features matter is important.

In this article, you’ll find a list ten “must-have shopping cart features” that either improve the shopping experience for the consumer or make it easier for the merchant. In truth, this probably should be a much longer list, since narrowing down shopping cart features to just ten important ones necessarily leaves out a lot of other important capabilities too. This list is also something of a matter of opinion. But at the moment, in mid-2011, these are the shopping cart features that I could not live without.

Finally, it may be helpful to quickly define “shopping cart.” In the context of this article, it is an ecommerce-specific content management system that — among other things — serves product detail pages to a shoppers’ web browsers, manages online transactions, and acts as the portal for site maintenance. Also, the terms ecommerce platform, shopping cart, and cart will all be used interchangeably.

You may also notice that features near the top of the list are relatively more important, in my view, and get a bit more ink, so to speak.

This first section of features is aimed at improving a shopper’s interaction with the site and boosting sales.

Large, Functional Product Images

Product images are among the most effective ways to communicate with customers on an ecommerce site.

“Now think about it, whenever you’re shopping online, the product image is the only opportunity you have to see that product, so if it’s not impressive from the photo, customers aren’t going to buy,” said Matt Winn, an online communications specialist with Volusion, a hosted ecommerce platform.

Although product images are essentially a standard feature on all shopping carts or ecommerce platforms, it is important to find a solution that is flexible enough to allow you or your developer to resize the images, since bigger is usually better. It is also helpful if the cart supports product image zooming.

As an example of how powerful a big, beautiful product image can be, take a look at the Victorinox site, the makers of Swiss Army knives.

Victorinox’ product pages feature large, zoom ready images.

Sometime ago I came across a picture of the Victorinox site in an article about product photography. The picture was so compelling that I went directly to the site.

Another example comes from clothing retailer Roxy, which uses 417 by 561 pixel product images on its product pages. Shoppers may also see a larger version of the image, which is 683 by 792 pixels.

Roxy uses 417 by 561 pixel product images on its site.

Uncrate is another example of a retailer using large product images to help it sell.

Uncrate often uses product images the full width of the page.

Product Reviews

A 2009 study from The Nielsen Company found that some 70 percent of respondents trusted “consumer opinions posted online.” While there may not be a perfect one-to-one relationship between “consumer opinions posted online” and product reviews on an ecommerce site, the study nonetheless provides some data. With this in mind, it is imperative that a shopping cart either includes support for product reviews right out of the box or has an easy way to implement third-party product reviews.

Several very successful online stores make excellent use of product reviews. For example, Newegg, the electronics retailer, frequently has more than 75 reviews for individual products. These reviews can help shoppers make good buying choices.

Newegg often has more than 75 individual product reviews on its product detail pages.

Layered and Faceted Navigation

Layered and faceted navigation make it much easier for shoppers to find just what they’re looking for on an ecommerce site.

This kind of navigation divides products into rational sub-categories, and displays those sub-categories as product filters. Using this kind of a system, shoppers may drill down to products based on price, color, features, or attributes. As executed in a shopping cart, this feature should be data driven and programmatic. A site administrator or owner needs only establish the business rules and the shopping cart should do the rest.

You will find examples of layered and faceted navigation on many — if not most — leading online retail sites. Zappos, the footwear retailer, makes extensive use of layers and facets on its pages. In fact, if you look at the URL for a typical Zappos product category page, you will even see references to these facets. Here’s an example:

http://www.zappos.com/search/null/filter/category/%22Swimwear%22/subCategoryFacet/ %22Swimwear+Bottoms%22/categoryFacet/%22Swimwear%22/productTypeFacet/%22Clothing%22

Notice “subCategoryFacet,” “categoryFacet,” and “productTypeFacet” in the URL above.

Zappos makes extensive use of facets and layers in its site navigation.

Single-Page, Fast Checkout

Actually paying for a purchase online is the last hurdle a shopper must traverse before completing an order. A shopper interested in buying wants to complete this step as quickly as possible, and a merchant should try to get out of the way.

“Just like the supermarket, online shoppers are looking for the shortest line,” Volusion said on its website.

One of the simplest methods to speeding checkout is to limit the checkout form to as few fields as possible and keep the entire form on a single page to avoid loading a new page at each stage of the checkout process.

Again according to Volusion, single page checkout “boosts sales conversions,” “reduces abandoned shopping carts,” “enhances user-friendliness”, and “streamlines customer experience.”

For examples of single-page checkouts, one can look at Kalyx, a retailer of women’s sports apparel.

Kalyx uses a single page checkout.

Search

As surprising as it may seem, some ecommerce platforms do not support site search. So be sure that the one you select does. What’s more, make search prominent.

OMG Jeans has a large search form in the upper-right corner of its site.

Coupons and Discounts

It is the Groupon-age, as sites like Groupon, Living Social, Google Deals, Retail Me Not, Rimbambo, and others offer shoppers daily deals, hourly deals, and oodles of coupons. In this environment, an online merchant must be able to process coupon and discount codes, so that deal crazy shoppers can get their savings fix.

A good ecommerce platform will have couponing and discounting built in. For example, when you shop at the U.S. Olympus store, the camera retailer, you’re given an opportunity to enter discount or coupon codes as soon as you start the checkout process.

Olympus, like many retailers, gladly accepts coupon codes.

Large effective product images; product reviews; layered and faceted navigation; single-page checkout, site search, and discount and coupons codes combine for a pretty powerful user experience, but a good ecommerce platform should also take care of the merchant. Here are three more features that you must have.

Product Import and Export

The Internet is always changing and evolving. Likewise, so is ecommerce. A few years ago, it would not have occurred to me that a shopping cart should have good product import and export capabilities, but now this is a must-have feature. Whether one is exporting product data to a shopping comparison site or a Facebook store or synchronizing inventory from an online store to a physical location, the ability to easily transfer price, inventory, or product updates in to or out of a shopping cart is essential.

Look for a cart that makes this extremely simple.

Easy Integration with Third Party Solutions

There are many ways to go about building an ecommerce shopping cart, including a modular construction that allows site owners to easily add third-party solutions. For example, if you would like to use QuickBooks for accounting, there should be a simple way to connect it to your shopping cart without spending a fortune on development work. Likewise, if you would like to use MailChimp to manage your newsletter, it should be easy to integrate.

Analytics and Sales Reporting

Finally, a good shopping cart must have built-in sales reporting and analytics capabilities — even if the later comes from simple integration with Google Analytics. Be sure that you can track product sales down to a significant level of detail. Sales reports should also be easy to export.

Summing Up

There are many shopping carts and even more shopping cart features to consider, but the ten listed here are essential.

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