Ten Ways to Instantly Improve Your Usability

Whether it’s an e-commerce site, an online tool, or just your company’s corporate sites–smart marketers know that web site usability is key to the success of any online presence. What a lot of marketers don’t know is the basic principles of web usability and how to apply those rules to their own online presence. Here are ten very easy ways to make an immediate impact on the usability of your site:

1. Home – Users want a home and they expect to see a link to home in the same place: the top left-hand part of your site. Don’t try to be creative and place your link on the right hand side, or at the bottom of a left navigation, or even worse, leave it off your navigation completely. You’ll just end up frustrating your users.

2. Links – Make links look like links. Designers hate the ugly blue, underlined text that indicates a hyperlink, but users love it. The standard blue, underlined text shows users implicitly that the content is a link. Now you don’t have to use that blue, underlined text, but do make sure your links look like links. You’ll want to also make sure that a visited link changes color.

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Use YouTube to Showcase Products

This is a great marketing tool

“Yugster, recently started to utilize video to showcase their products. According to a press release, since December 2006, when the company began to create videos which help customers to understand what they are buying, there was significant improvement for the website’s success.

Company is planing to create VideoYugs for over 90% of the products available on their website. Yugster produces their videos in house utilizing YouTube, which in turn may drive additional visits and sales when videos are viewed by YouTube members.”

read more at Yugster Uses YouTube To Showcase Their Products

Market a Website Using Google Tools

Google is kicking some serious butt with their range of free tools for webmasters. Google’s tools are so much more advanced than any offerings from Microsoft or Yahoo or any of the minor players, that there is no real need to mention them at all!

Google has cleverly devised this set of tools, knowing the high probability that the website owner / marketer is probably going to use Google Adwords which coincidentally links in beautifully with the rest of the software.

The cornerstone to understanding a websites success is to measure its performance on a goal based level. For an E-Commerce site, the most important goal is usually a sale. Other sites may consider new members, contact from the visitor, number of blog comments, or even whether certain pages are viewed or not. continue reading?

Ecommerce Site Owners Thoughts

If you were starting over in ecommerce, what would you do differently?

Ecommerce owners do a lot of trial-and-error work on their way to building a successful operation. Along the way to success, it often becomes clear that the road could have been less rocky if a few things were done differently. Hindsight is often painfully clear. Several ecommerce owners outlined what they would do differently, if they had the chance to start over.

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Strategies for Successful eCommerce

The goal of any online business is to sell something, be it a product, service, or information. To accomplish this, you need customers, or traffic, to your web site. Follow these key Internet business strategies to generate customers and cash.

Image is Everything
Your web site should reflect how you want customers to feel about your business. The site must be professional looking and easy to navigate and understand. The content provided should be relevant to the needs of the customer. read more at Internet Business Strategies for Successful eCommerce