Tips on building a winning KISS website ~ Part One
JP's Most Important E-commerce Web Design Tips
Kiss Web DesignDesign

The most important rule to good website design is KISS. "Keep It Simple Stupid"
Accurate, Basic, Clean, Credible, Convincing, Faithful, Fresh-looking, Genuine,
Practical, Pure, Realistic, Simple, Straightforward, Trouble-free, True,
 Uncontaminated, Uncorrupted, Well thought-out, and Winning.

Create A Rough Draft on paper before you build your website.
Keeping your audience in mind, create a rough draft of your websites goals. Surprisingly the basic website is like putting together a story. Your site should have a beginning, middle, and end. Outline your sites functions with diagrams and templates. You may find as you are going over your rough drafts, diagrams, and templates, that you end up with a different design than the one you began with. Be open to change if the original design framework doesn't support your goals.  

• Design Images:
  Optimized, Clear, and Faithful to the depiction of your site. IE: Are you selling dolls? Why do you have background images of horses and a horse image in your companies logo?
   
• Product Images:
  Optimized, Clear, and Small. LARGE images that take to long to load aggravate people. If a page takes too long to download, you will loose your audience. Do you need to show more product detail? Use a popup link to a larger detailed product image.
   
• Fonts:
  If your site contains text then you must read this!
  LIGHT BACKGROUND WITH DARK TEXT, LIGHT BACKGROUND WITH DARK TEXT, LIGHT BACKGROUND WITH DARK TEXT, LIGHT BACKGROUND WITH DARK TEXT, LIGHT BACKGROUND WITH DARK TEXT, LIGHT BACKGROUND DARK TEXT, LIGHT BACKGROUND WITH DARK TEXT.
   
  Did you understand the above? Please do not break the cardinal rule above, or I will guarantee that you will loose a mass portion of your audience.
   
  The most used fonts online are: Verdana, Arial, Trebuchet MS, and Comic Sans.
   
• Navigation:
  Two clicks to anywhere.
  
• E-Commerce Website Tips and JP's Vexations:
  1. Save the cute stuff for your personal sites. Say no to flashing, bouncing, irritating moving things.
   
  2. Popup Windows annoy 99.9% of the world. Do you want to annoy the world?
   
  3. I do not want to hear your music... my music is already playing on my computer! Background Music is for personal sites only! REALLY.... if I can not turn your background music off.... I am leaving! You are not the only one selling hand made quilts online. By the way... Please send any unwanted hand made quilts my way. I will give them a good home to live in.
   
  4. Whose products are you trying to sell? Yours or the products on all the links that are plastered all over your site? Create reciprocal link pages for this purpose and create a master " Exchange Links" to take your viewers to your favorite link pages.
   
  5. DO NOT HIDE reciprocal links or most sites will not trade reciprocal links with your site. You should not link to sites that hide your link either. Hiding reciprocal links is contemptible and childish and should not be supported in any way! With all the thousands of sites available, take your time and link wisely.
   
  6. Check for spelling errors, slow loading pages, and make sure all of your site's links are working prior to publishing.
    
  7. Basic Pages needed to create an e-commerce website: Home Page, Mission Page, Policies Page, Product Pages, and How To Shop Page. More coming soon in "Part Two ~ The Basic Pages". Register to join our mailing list for updates to our country craft shop mall.
  

"The only way to grow competently is to share knowledge."  Kind regards, JP
November 2005 PCC Graphics and Website Design ©