Designing Your E-Commerce Site for Service

Before they Find the Door...

market

advertising resources

Word of mouth (whether real or by endorsement by well-known directories and awards sites) is the most powerful form of online traffic enhancement.

Banner advertising can be an expensive mistake, unless you (or the guy selling you the banner slots) can prove its worth.

Promotional tricks, from competitions to mailing lists, can slowly build a useful and appropriate customer base for you, but you need to avoid overdoing it.

Offline advertising (printing your email and Web address on your stationery, posters, and all printed material) may eventually move all your offline customers into your e-business.

Plan and budget for promotion and advertising for six or twelve months at a time, and regard it as one of the integral costs of your business online.

The Front End: Building for Business

Style - your visitor needs to experience the correct impression of what kind of business you run, and they''ll get a lot of this from the style of your site.

Function - what your visitor can do in, through and with your site. Providing your visitors with the bare essentials of locating and ordering your products is never enough - you should use the effectively infinite size of your site to give them everything they need to make that decision.

Navigation - how visitors move around inside your site. Navigation is a form of prompted search, and visitors should very quickly and confidently travel around your site before handing you your paycheck.

Interactivity - a shockingly overused word, but how your site appears to respond - to visitors'' actions and questions, as well as to the passage of time - is critical in ensuring that the visitor doesn''t leave thinking nobody''s home.