Boost E-Commerce Sales With An Effective Website Design. The way we do business today has changed. With the internet becoming the one-stop solution for all our needs, our customers expect us to be able to serve them digitally. Business-customer interactions have gone completely digital and while this has made it a seamless process without complete thought and consideration this can be a big challenge. 

Look at it this way if you own a physical store and customers walk in you are physically there to help locate it, talk about it and even offer suggestions and recommendations. However, when you own an e-commerce store your customers are on their own in that sense. You may have a search option or even a chat window to help them but nothing compares to the experience of shopping online when your design and website interface makes it easy for customers to move around on their own. 

Thus, your website design greatly impacts your customer experience and has a direct impact on your e-commerce sales. 

You must consider the complete customer journey from the time they land on your e-commerce store to the point they checkout to be able to create an optimized user-flow and a seamless buying experience for them. 

Design Tips to Boost E-commerce Sales

When designing your new e-commerce store, or revamping an existing one, it’s critical to think of all the design elements that make it easy, enjoyable and effective for your customers to make purchases. Let’s look at some crucial design elements that need your attention. 

White Space

One cannot emphasize enough on how important it is to have adequate white space between different sections, elements and images on your website. White space refers to space you leave between the images, text and different sections so it clearly separates each of them from the other. This makes it easy for customers to give individual attention to each, makes it easy-on-the-eye and at the same time highlights all the necessary information. Without adequate white space, a website looks crammed for space and valuable information may get lost in the crowd. 

Clear Call-To-Actions

A call-to-action or CTA helps your customer know exactly what they are expected to do and adds to their shopping experience. ‘Buy Now’, ‘Add to Cart’, ‘Head to Checkout’, ‘Make Payment’ etc are all direct CTAs that simplify the buying experience and make it easy for a customer to fulfil the seamless buying process you have created for them. Lack of CTAs can lead to confusions and may even force the customer to abandon your cart or website without completing the journey. Also, ensure you pick a bold colour from your defined brand colours, to design better buttons so they stand out and draw attention. 

Simplify Checkout

While some customers may want to browse around and maybe looking at different products on your e-commerce website, most know what they want and will expect a quick checkout process. You can add a quick checkout solution by reducing the number of steps or pages a customer needs to go through before they can complete the purchase. This will also help you reduce the number of customers who quit the process mid-way or worse, abandon shopping carts. 

Images Vs. Text

Both impactful imagery and effective landing copy play a critical role in influencing buying decisions. However, the key is in striking the right balance between the two. For an e-commerce website, it is important to invest in professional photography for your own products so customers can see what they look like as well as creative text like product name and product description to understand the products use, benefits, and other important information. You could also use free stock photos that are available online. Do not rely on either one to help customers make a decision. Use these as ways to help customers know what they can expect when they buy your products. 

Product Descriptions & Website Copy

Coming to the product descriptions and website copy, keep it concise yet informative. Do not write long paragraphs, instead use bullet points, one-liners and keep a ‘Read More’ option wherever necessary to keep the text minimal. You must also consider the text for vital information like shipping or returns policy, terms and conditions, FAQs and other critical information. It’s best to create a separate page for these or add it to the bottom of the page so it doesn’t crowd or overwhelm the shopping experience. 

Minimal is Effective

When you think website design; think minimal. Stick to a few basic colours, 2-3 different fonts, and strike a minimal yet effective image to text ratio. The idea is to give your e-commerce website a neat and minimal look, highlighting the necessary information and making the buying process as easy as possible. Avoid crowding your product pages with too many products stacked right next to one another white space between different products makes each stand out. Don’t write long blogs or essays to describe your products. Only highlight the necessary information. 

Think Simple; Boost Sales

If you want to create an e-commerce website that boosts sales and maximises conversions, you need to focus on just one design aspect Simplicity. 

Yes, the simpler your website is in terms of design, buying experience and understanding of your products the more likely you are to boost your sales. 

When a potential customer lands on your e-commerce store it must be easy-on-the-eye, self-explanatory and hassle-free when it comes to buying your products. After all, like we said before it’s not a physical store where you can hand-hold and support the buying process in-person. But you can use design to support and help your customers. 

You have great products and you know there’s a large customer base that would benefit from your products don’t let a poorly designed website come in the way of that. Instead, use design to enhance and amplify your sales and customer base. 

Get Designing Get Selling! 

Did you know WordPress powers 34% of the internet, which is 4% more than how it was in 2018? WordPress hosts 37.5 million websites, and among them, The New Yorker, TechCrunch, Variety, TED, and People might be some websites you already know. 

While setting your WordPress website, some mistakes will be made when you try to change anything. But you don’t have to be discouraged so quickly. With the growing popularity of WordPress, many developers discover themselves operating on bigger websites that demand plenty of maintenance work. Develop a website is easy but it’s very difficult to make it SEO friendly especially if you want to rank your article on Google. By following these WordPress SEO Tips, you can boost your ranking in Google Search Engine. If a mistake occurs, you would have to start from scratch and if you already have traffic, your visitors won’t be happy to see the page not working when they need it the most. If you are guilty of doing this, then you need a better workflow.

The Three Versions

Each website you manage should at least have a Local, a Staging (for client review and questions/answers) and a Live version. Your work should flow through these alternatives in order as you proceed through the cycle of project development. Everything from attaching the latest widget to recreating the whole website should done in this sequence. 

Step 1: Local WordPress Development

Previously, several developers choose the command line for local development employing tools such as XAMPP, Vagrant, and VVV. While these tools are useful for workflow development, real user interfaces like Gutenberg are better to finish this job. This is where you can use Local by FlyWheel. Local lets you design WordPress installations straight on the computer with only a few clicks. You can also back your live website and pull it inside the Local window, to begin with, the accurate copy. You can also push and put your whole website with one click. It is that easy. 

When you are done with this step, you have a local site on your hand. This site is not access by anyone but you. Here, you can do any modifications you’d want. 

Once you have a local working WordPress website copy, it is time to start the work. Custom PHP changes are now straightforward for you. With a local website, you can change the file for themes and see the modifications in real-time minus the need to extend through Git or transmit them back to your server through FTP. Instead, you will have the capability to check everything on the local URL straightaway. 

Step 2: Staging

Staging websites are the middle ground between live and local. It is where you will ensure that your modifications behave with the site’s server and show the changes to a client before making them live. For this purpose, it is crucial to ensure that your staging site is based on the same server as the live site. Diversity in the server ecosystem between live and staging can lead you to some unexpected problems. For instance, something that is fine with PHP 5 may not behave very well with PHP 7. The PHP of your staging website has to match that of your live website. 

Compatibility is important during this stage. If you don’t pay attention to it, you might have to start again. The same goes for all the extra bits you add to the site as well as themes, plugins, media, and so on.   

●    Plugins

Plugins are usually third-party and thus, do not require any version management from your side. For this purpose, you can opt to push all latest plugins to the staging website via FTP. While they upload, you can move on to the other steps without a worry.

●    Themes

If you are working with a customized theme from WordPress, you should be monitoring changes utilizing Git. Employing a tool like DeployHQ, you can deploy changes from your Bitbucket or Github container easily to both your live and staging website.  

If you are employing a third-party theme, you should not be changing the base theme files, so push that on to the staging server through FTP. If you are making modifications to a child theme, you can use version control and an extension method, or upload your changed child theme to the FTP-server. 

●    Databases and Media

These are separate entities, but the reason why they are group is simple. The plugin you can employ for database migration is Migrate DB Pro by Delicious Brains, and this plugin also manages media files. Any change media file can be pull or push from one WordPress base to another along with the database with a single click. 

Step 3: Go Live

Once you have entirely tested your modifications on the staging website, it is time to go live. Providers for hosting that have in-built staging ecosystems usually have a one-click point to make this possible. If you do not have that choice, replicate the migrating process from local version to staging version, but now you do it from staging version to live version. And you are finally done after that.

Conclusion

Locally installing your WordPress is helpful, and it allows you to make website modifications, operating updates, check plugins and themes, and more in a hazard-free ecosystem. It may feel awkward if you’re a beginner, but local WordPress development will become second nature once you pick it up. For hosting a WordPress website, you could choose Shared Hosting. Opting for Shared Hosting, especially during the initial stage when you’re still figuring things out is economical, as server maintenance can be manage more easily. However, once you are well-versed you can move to WordPress Hosting as it caters specifically to WordPress websites and has more benefits for your website.  

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Understanding Service Design and its Principles. Design is an amalgamation of several things as it draws inspiration from varied fields and areas. In today’s day and age, apart from emotions, intelligence and aesthetics, technology too plays a vital role. Service design is one such modern-day design influenced by marketing, project management and user experience to enhance services. Let us see what service design is and its principles in detail. 

What is Service Design?

The term ‘Service Design’ originated in the year 1991 as a design discipline by Professors Michael Erlhoff and Brigit Mager at Köln International School of Design. Service design is an evolving field with no strict definition. However, in practice, service design can be defined as The process in which the designer focuses on creating optimal service experiences.

It can thus be said that design is a customer-first design that takes into account the needs of the customer, so that the design is user-friendly, competitive in the market, as well as, relevant to the customer. 

For example, imagine a Food Delivery App where the primary idea is to connect the restaurant to the client (the one ordering food). Here, there are a host of employees ranging from the delivery agent, head of the delivery app, manager of the restaurant, and waiter. design focuses on how the Food Delivery App connects to the restaurant and delivers it to the customer on time. This includes placing the order to the restaurant on behalf of the customer, to onboarding new delivery agents, communication between the delivery agent and the restaurant manager, as well as, manager and the waiter. Each segment plays an important role in the food that is deliver to the customer, even though it is not directly a part of the customer experience. 

You can map service design using a service blueprint. Service blueprint helps to visualise processes to optimise how a business delivers the user experience.

The 5 Principles of Service Design

We’ve covered the definition of service design, let us now move on to understanding the practical application of the design and its principles. We’ll also see, what it is that differentiates service design from UX. 

‘This is Service Design Thinking’, by Marc Stickdorn and Jakob Schneider, is one of the foremost books outlining the five basic principles that dominate service design.

1. User-centred – users are the centre of consideration and are to be analyse through qualitative research. Here Users are both, the organisation’s employees, as well as customers. Thus, service design considers not just the user/customer experience but also the interest of all the relevant people involved in the process.
2. Co-creative – co-creative is essentially a combination of Collaboration and Iteration. Collaboration signifies the process of creation by all the contributors from different backgrounds. Whereas, Iteration is use to define that service design is an iterative (continuous) process that’s ever-evolving to keep in-line with the changes in a business.
3. Sequencing – dividing complex services of a customers journey into independent processes. This division of service is usually done logically, visually and rhythmically. Sequencing helps determine the timeline of a project, as it is important for the customer and helps in determining the outcome. For instance, if you have an e-commerce website selling products only in a particular region, it is important to highlight that the deliveries won’t ship internationally right at the start.
4. Evidencing – visualising the service experiences and making them real. Simply put, what this means is that service is usually invisible or intangible whereas the products are tangible items. The idea of service design is to bind the tangible and intangible together so that the invisible becomes real. For example, if you run an organic cafe with all the ingredients being local produce, how would your customer know it is organic? The answer is easy, you let them know. Evidencing ensures that you’re providing your customers with a quality experience. Which, in turn, helps you build your brand image as an ‘organic’ cafe.
5. Holistic – service design rests on the principle of combining tangible and intangible services. Here the context is important, as well as, taking the entire experience of the service into account. What this means is, every customer is different and as such, would take a different route to complete their journey.As a service designer, it is imperative to think about each aspect, and every perspective to make sure there are no loop-holes. That whichever path the customer takes the end goal remains the same.

Tools you can use

Now, that we’ve seen what service design is and its principles. Let us move on to finding the right tools to map your customer journey. Nevertheless, the good news is that several UX and marketing tools overlap with service design.

Here are our top 3 picks of the tools you can use: 

• Customer Journey Map:

A customer journey map helps you visualise and plot the best and worst parts of a customer’s experiences. The idea is to put the customer’s perspective to paper right from the time they came to your service, to the point where they’ve decided to use your service and reach the end goal. 

For example, you have an e-commerce website, and the journey in simple can be divide into – customer browsing your website, adding products to the cart, either abandoning them or purchasing them.  

‘This is Service Design Thinking’ offer a customer journey canvas for you in your design service. In fact, you can collaborate with your stakeholders and customers to ensure your map is co-creative. This is free and available in 7 different languages viz. English, Spanish, Korean, Portuguese, Polish, German, and French. 

• smaply: 

Smaply is a popular web-base software tool that enables you to visualise Personas, Customer Journey Maps, and Stakeholder Maps. With smaply, you can digitise, customise, share, comment, standardise and present your results with the team in an easy and quick manner. 

• experiencefellow:

Experiencefellow is a tool that uses mobile ethnography to research and collect customer experiences in a digital environment. Ethnography is essentially observing your customers in their natural environment to gain better insights into their overall experience. 

With experience fellow, this research is digitise as it enables customers to document their experiences with a simple smartphone app. As a business, you can then view and analyse your customers’ journey based on the data provided by them on your browser.

Even though service design is in a developing phase, there are several tools out there in the market to help businesses cater to their customers better by understanding their journey. Service design is thus, not just for designers but for anyone who wishes to integrate services for a more powerful and effective approach to drive businesses, as it focuses on how customer touchpoints are connect in their journey.

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WordPress Hosting stands out as the optimal choice for WordPress websites, offering exceptional performance and seamless compatibility. Its configuration is finely tuned to elevate WordPress sites, delivering remarkable speed and reliability. What truly sets it apart are the tailored WordPress management features it offers. Website owners can effortlessly oversee and maintain their sites, eliminating the need for extra resources. While features may vary among hosting providers, the advantages of WordPress Hosting are consistently remarkable.

• Highly compatible with WordPress
• Enhances the performance of WP websites.
• WordPress is pre-installed to provide a plug and play environment for developers.
• Automatic WordPress updates to keep you up to date all the time.
• Cloud-based hosting infrastructure that provides a high level of scalability.
• Automated backups using CodeGuard.
• Daily malware scanning and security with SiteLock.
• Pre-installed plugins that make your job easier
• Managed services that take-up WordPress maintenance.

To get a better understanding of the benefits of WP Hosting, let’s look at them individually in detail.

1. Performance:

Every software will have its own system requirements that determine how efficiently the software will function. With that in mind, even WordPress as a software has its ideal system requirements. WordPress Hosting ensures that the hardware, firmware, and software configuration is highly compatible so that it runs efficiently.
Having a system that is compatible ensures that you do not run into performance issues and system freezes. If the system does not function properly, the hosted website may crash, or temporarily be out of service which will have serious implications on the website’s authority and visitor’s experience.

2. WordPress is Pre-Installed:

Developers who take up WordPress projects regularly would love this feature. With WordPress pre-installed, you have no need to spend time downloading and installing the CMS on the server. You just purchase the plan and begin developing the website. This saves a lot of time and you never have to worry about compatibility issues.

3. Automatic WordPress Updates:

Another important benefit for WordPress Hosting is automatic WordPress updates. Every update that is released comes with a bunch of improvements and bug fixes. If your instance of WordPress hosting is not up-to-date, not only will you lose out on these essential improvements and bug fixes, but also become more susceptible to external security threats. The automatic update feature of WP Hosting ensures that you are covered on this front. At times, the website you are hosting is not compatible with newer versions of WordPress. Although this scenario is very rare, it still persists. In such cases, turning off automatic updates is just a switch flip away.

4. Cloud-Based Hosting:

One of the biggest benefits of WordPress Hosting plans is that the hosting is Cloud-Based. Which means the advantages of Cloud Hosting are cascaded to the WordPress Hosting. These advantages include scalability at the click of a button and a high level of reliability as there is no single point of failure. Moreover, we integrate
Varnish Cache within this Cloud-based environment that has the potential to increase your website’s speed by 1000%.

5. Great Security and Backup

Our WordPress hosting packages provide the option to include premium website security and backup tools. One of them being CodeGuard, which automatically takes website backup periodically so that you have enough restore points in case of a disaster. The other tool that our WP Hosting contains is SiteLock. This software regularly monitors the website for malware and security threats and notifies you to take necessary action. SiteLock can also be configure in order to deal with security threats automatically in case of an encounter.

6. Pre-installed Jetpack Plugin:

Plugins form a very strong base for WordPress development. Any task or functionality that you can imagine can be made possible with plugins. Our WP Hosting plans integrate certain essential plugins such as Jetpack plugin. This plugin can be use for a variety of functions including provisioning of WordPress themes, lazy loading, marketing services such as analytics, automate social media and SEO tools, Payment gateway integrations and high-end security for your website.

7. Managed Services:

Another very useful advantage is the inclusion of managed services. What this means is that the WP Hosting team takes care of dealing with all your website maintenance tasks. Without managed services, you as the website owner are responsible for taking care of the WordPress maintenance which requires resources. Manage services include a barrage of activities like scalability of hosting resources such as CPU, RAM and storage space. As your website grows, you will need more hosting resources to handle the incoming traffic load. This can be easily done by the manage team without you having to worry about the specifics.
Another example of managed services is the optimization of the WP Database. The WP Database holds all the important information of your website such as pages, posts, form entries, cookies, plugin settings, theme settings etc. As your website grows, this database becomes bulky. Bulky WP databases are usually slow and need to be optimize so that they do not affect the overall speed of the website. The managed hosting team takes care of this on their own without you having to intervene.

As you can see from the above information, WordPress Hosting brings a lot of advantages to the table and should definitely be consider for WordPress sites of all sizes. If you have any questions or if you require any clarity on the benefits of WordPress Hosting, please feel free to reach out to us or pen down your thoughts in the comments section below. We will be more than happy to read through them and get back to you. If you are interested in looking at various WordPress Hosting plans available at Webzworld, please have a look here. Hope this helps and stay tuned for more great content!

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Creating custom experiences eCommerce website design matters is key to winning customers’ hearts – and seizing market share.

We’ve been designing high-performing websites for over 19 years, and eCommerce sites are at the core of our expertise.

We’re focused on creating strategic, compelling designs that deliver unique experiences, driving purchases and bringing users back again and again.

What’s important in eCommerce website design

To sell products, you need to sell your users on your brand. Leading users to purchase means taking a closer look at who they are, what keeps them interested, eCommerce website design matters and why they convert.

Audience insights:

 People have tons of options on where to spend their money. By educating, solving problems, and meeting user objections, you make your business the best option.

Experience-driven design:

In today’s eCommerce landscape, user experience is everything. With customers becoming more discriminating, a compelling user experience is a powerful differentiator.

Purchasing convenience:

Complex and confusing experiences leave sales on the table. If users can’t get from product page to checkout in just a few clicks, they’ll start looking elsewhere.

The pain of an underperforming website 

Your website represents your brand. And a site that’s slow, unreliable, or hard to use is a website that customers and prospects will avoid. Internal teams also suffer when small website changes are agonizingly slow, and big changes are out of the question. 

What to look for in a website developer

If you’re not a technology person, it’s not easy to choose a technology partner to develop your website. Fortunately, there are qualities you can look for without reviewing a single line of code.

A genuine interest in your business needs. The newest and shiniest solution isn’t always the most appropriate. Taking an interest in your business isn’t just polite – it’s the only way for your agency to make sure the solution fits your true requirements.

Rigorous project management. Your website agency must manage time and budget as well as the work quality. Webzworld has the tools, experience, and skills to keep the project on the rails and push the boundaries of possibility.

Our website development process

No two projects are the same, but our process has served us and our clients well across hundreds of website builds.

Technical Discovery

Assessing the situation, goals, and requirements

We begin by assessing your current environment and technology stack, speaking to your key stakeholders and tech leads. Our goal is to understand your business needs, and learn how these inform your technology requirements. If we’re also designing your website, technical discovery is part of an integrated discovery and strategy process. website

Planning

Creating a tech strategy that works

An optimal technology architecture requires a skillful balancing of factors – current and future needs, workflows, integrations, regulatory requirements, in-house technical resources and, of course, budget – to arrive at the right solution. 

Our experienced technology team acts as your strategic partners – helping you rebuild your tech stack or finding a solution that plays nicely with the tools you have.

Front- and Back-End Coding website

Our development teams are fluent in the whole range of modern web development languages, including PHP, HTML5, CSS and Javascript. With our range of partnerships.

Every build is assigned a dedicated technical Project Manager, who will support your equally dedicated Account Director in efficiently managing work quality, time, and budget.

QA

Testing against over 100 checkpoints

We’re fanatical about QA, with dedicated teams ruthlessly evaluating the site against over 100 checkpoints before it even gets close to going live.

CMS Training + Launch website

Preparing your team for handover

When we deliver your new site, we don’t just throw you the keys and run. We walk you through the CMS, show you how to use it (and how not to use it), and make sure everyone touching the website is comfortable with managing it. Launch day is time to celebrate – and to start planning enhancements that deliver even more value to your users and business.