You have invested time, effort and money in building a website so that you can launch a perfectly functional online store. The day has finally arrived as you have done all the heavy lifting. But, before you push the “GO” button, think again – Is the website ready?
Launching a website can be stressful as you are dealing with a number of different variables. In a midst of developing a website and keenness to make it live, it is very easy to overlook a number of things like broken links, grammatical / spelling mistakes or load time etc. A good functional website can easily drive your sales and boost the revenue but a bad non-functional website can become a reason of driving your customers away.
Here are a few key things to always double check before launching your store site:
Quality content
Even if you have the best layout and graphics on your site that makes your online store look fancy, if your site lacks quality content, all the effort that you have been putting to your site is a waste. Content is key to any successful e-Commerce store. Nothing looks less professional than having content on your store site with grammatical or spelling mistakes. So, it is very important to go over the content several times for taking out any errors, formatting issues, non-consistent text size and text alignment etc. Make sure you do not have large paragraphs for product descriptions as nobody likes to read a chunk of text. It is important to break down a big paragraph into smaller ones.
In your site layout, a right proportion between your graphics and the white space keeps the user focused on the content of your website. Too many ads, banners, buttons, product images or icons can easily make your web page a bit heavy.
Tip: Learn more about How to make your e-Commerce site look more professional
Pay attention to the elements that makes your website user-friendly
In order to make your website user-friendly, it is important to make it look visually good. This includes: making sure your colors work together on the site. A lot of web designers like to keep the color theme consistent by using the same colors that are being used in the business logo. It is always a good design practice to make use of complimentary colors that make your text readable so that it does force your online audience to squint or give them a headache while reading the content. A good usage of contrast in your design will always make your website look more professional. Text is a very important part of your website. It is there to make your website informative and answer the online visitor’s questions. The font color is quite important thing in regard to the ease of readability. Try avoiding mistakes like: Using yellow or florescent color on a while background or red color on blue background that will make the text quite hard to read.
Tip: Learn more about Why it is important for store owners to understand the difference between user-experience and user-interface
Set your SEO strategy
This is probably one of the most common mistakes in an online business world. Not focusing on search engine optimization (SEO) but still expecting a magic to happen that will put the store site on No.1 position on all search engines like Google, Bing & Yahoo. Search engines are the most common medium by which businesses present their products or services to their target customers. The rank of your store site is entirely based on how well you as a business owner optimize your site for various search engines. If you do not know how to accomplish this, it is quite important to get some professional help because you could be throwing away large volume of free traffic.
Tip: If you are a new store owner, you should certainly read one of the articles that we posted about SEO myths: Top 5 modern SEO myths in e-commerce world
Some other key things that should always be double checked before site launch are as follows:
- Make sure you have your company address and contact information posted correctly
- Check cross-browser compatibility
- Make sure your website is responsive
- Make sure HTML/CSS is properly validated and there are no script errors
- Make sure you have a favicon in place
- Make sure you are capturing the web analytics / data
nopCommerce has a wealth of features and capabilities designed to create online store. nopCommerce is the leading open source shopping cart, allowing people to set up an online store quickly and easily. The software contains both a catalog frontend and an administration tool backend. nopCommerce comes with a free default theme that offers a consistent layout across all pages of the website and make your online store look professional. The design is very clean and easy to customize. nopCommerce default layout/theme also support a responsive design that is optimized for all screen sizes.
Author: Lavish Kumar