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Five Great Checkout Page Techniques

Anum — Fri, 29 Oct 2010 11:41:08 +0000

A streamlined checkout process is essential for an enjoyable online shopping experience. This is because a pleasurable experience often translates into increased sales and registrations. The main goal is simple: direct customers to the checkout button. Design that does this well can make a huge difference in the way that customers interact with the site. Design that does not do this well can make customers quickly disappear.

Because the checkout process carries such high value, its design should be carefully thought out and logical. Below you will find several tips and hints to make your checkout page design the smoothest possible.

Provide Live Help

If the main objective for a checkout page is to guide a customer to the checkout button, the sub-goal is to prevent them from canceling the checkout process once initiated. Designers need to know that, unless a checkout page provides a sure way to get questions answered, customers just may go elsewhere. One good way to do this is to provide live help. Customers need live help because not every issue or problem fits nicely into a well-organized FAQ or cleverly designed Help page. Provide a chat or telephone assistance button so that customers have access to professional support to resolve doubts about a particular term or condition. It could go a long way.

Show Next Steps

One of the most important factors in checkout page design is the way the checkout process is presented to the customer. The page should communicate well and offer the essential details of each transaction, including what comes next. Knowing what to expect, will give customers the sense of security, they need to see the process all the way through to the end.

Indicate Progress

Equally important is the way a checkout page indicates progress throughout the checkout process. Visually, much can be done to enhance the user’s experience and adding a progress feature is one of them. This technique can be used alone or in conjunction with the above technique to give the customer motivation to follow through to a completed sale.

User Inclusion

The customer is always right – even online. It makes sense that designers should be careful to include the customer in the process as much as possible. Some pages make the mistake of directing the customer to another page, for more help or to view terms and conditions, during the checkout phase. This, however, can be confusing and disorienting for customers and a disoriented, confused customer is likely to end the checkout process prematurely. Avoid all this by using pop-up windows to incorporate extra information, and keep the basic details of the checkout on one page as much as possible.

No Registration Required

One of the best ways to turn customers off is to require that they register before the checkout process begins. You’ll want to keep your checkout path up front and to-the-point without significant barriers and distracting forms impeding the way. Engage your customers early on in the process by pushing time consuming action steps and effort to the very end. This ensures that the shopping experience is not interrupted and may be more likely to result in a completed sale.

Creative techniques of link baiting

Richard Teahon — Wed, 20 May 2009 21:56:06 +0000

The virtual world is a testimony to the abundant creativity in web designers of all platforms, which is contrary to the belief that creativity is rare.

Public relations are an indispensable part of an organisation. The necessity to create a market for your product through the publicity of the product is as important as the products itself. As creativity and public relations are required for product promotion then the web is arguably the best way to do it. It is therefore essential that creative techniques of link baiting are used.

Web designers use their creativity to put forth a novel website to the viewers. PR is possible on the website not merely by creating attractive advertisements for the potential clients, but also by creating back links. Back links enables the search engine to choose the web page ranking position efficiently, so in effect this is a search engine optimisation tool.

Numerous links leads to heavy traffic and eventually great PR. In order to optimise efficiency , link baiting is used to create a long list of keywords to refer back to your site. As more and more people visit your web page the search engine ranking position of your web page is made more obvious to the public. Internet is the fastest and the easiest way to reach the audience, which is probably why creative techniques of link baiting have been developed.

The techniques of link baiting are both subtle and blatant. Certain link baiting techniques are used commonly amongst web masters as they have proved more successful. Consider the following creative link baiting techniques:

A contest is a very popular link baiting technique used by web masters. Numerous contests request the contestants to write a short article or a few lines about their company. Are they actually interested in what you to think about them? Not really, the whole purpose of asking viewers to write about them, is that this strategy creates numerous back links. A more loaded a website with back links, gives a better placement position on the search engine results display page.

Offering free tools to the viewers also increases link baiting. When a website offers creative tools to the users, many discussions are held on blogs and forums about the tools a web page offers. Being talked about everywhere magnifies and glorifies the brand image of companies by creating abundant back links.

Another creative technique of link baiting is creating lists. If lists like “top 100 ways of making money online”, are released then it gets infinite back links. The subject matter also gets great attention.

Controversies are not a suggested way to create back links but numerous sites exploit this technique as well. Bloggers and web masters attacking your content also aid in increasing the number of back links. Creating unique and original content and being the first to publish that content on the web also brings with it great opportunities to be talked about across the internet.

As your content is unique people will refer to your website time and again and bloggers will also discuss it publicly. Generalised tutorials like speaking English or any language used in the global domain will also increase readership and back links.

Attacks, are a bane of the search engine optimization technique of link baiting. So next time you come across controversies, attacks, contests, free tools and lists on the web page you will know the reason for it- link baiting to increase traffic. All these are creative techniques of link baiting will enhance the brand image of a company or serve vested interests.

CSS web design techniques to die for

Richard Teahon — Fri, 15 May 2009 00:01:57 +0000

We are big fans of CSS as you know. We have showed how it is superior to table design layouts, in every conceivable way. It is so easy to modify design, allow implementation of several designers to work on different aspects of a web design, and it allows seperation of design elements. What is not to love?

For this reason, it is not only loved and adored, but written about. So we have included over 53 links to various articles about CSS, that have been written about it. This is good news if you use CSS to design and develop websites, as you can use this as a quick reference guide. They really are worth dying for, and if you don’t believe me, give them a whirl.

Cascading Style Sheets have become really popular, and if you are not using them you should be. We have numours articles about CSS on our site. Have a read and see what you think.

The links:

1. CSS Image Replacement

2. Navigation Matrix Reloaded

3. CSS Tabs

4. CSS Bar Graphs (CSS For Bar Graphs)

5. Collapsing Tables: An Example

6. Adam’s Radio & Checkbox Customisation Method

7. CSS Based Navigation

8. CSS Shadows (CSS Shadows Roundup)

9. CSS Rounded Corners Roundup (Nifty Corners)

10. Drop Cap – Capital Letters with CSS

11. Define Image Opacity with CSS

12. How to Create a Block Hover Effect for a List of Links

13. Pullquotes with CSS (Automatic Pullquotes with JavaScript and CSS

14. CSS Diagrams

15. CSS Curves

16. Footer Stick

17. CSS Image Map

18. CSS Image Pop-Up

19. CSS Image Preloader

20. CSS Image Replacement for Buttons

21. Link Thumbnail

22. CSS Map Pop

23. PHP-based CSS Style Switcher

24. CSS Unordered List Calender (CSS Styled Calender)

25. CSS-Based Forms: Techniques

26. CSS-Based Tables: Techniques

27. Printing Web-Documents and CSS

28. Improved Links-Display for Print-Layouts with CSS

29. CSS-Submit Buttons

30. CSS Teaser Box

31. CSS Tricks for Custom Bullets

32. Ticked Off Links Reloaded

33. CSS Zooming

34. Creating a Star Rater using CSS

35. The ways to style visited Links

36. PDF, ZIP, DOC Links Labeling

37. Displaying Percentages with CSS

38. Image Floats without the Text Wrap

39. Let visitors decide, whether or not will they open link in a new window

40. Simple accessible external links

41. Zebra Table with JavaScript and CSS

42. Vertical Centering with CSS (Horizontal and Vertical Centering with CSS

43. Unobtrusive Sidenotes

44. Image Caption with CSS (Styled Images with Caption)

45. Dynamic Piechart with CSS

46. Format Footnotes with CSS

47. Hierarchical Sitemap with CSS

48. Snook’s Resizable Underlines

49. Switchy McLayout: An Adaptive Layout Technique

50. StyleMap: CSS+HTML Visual Sitemap

51. Custom Reading Width

52. CSS Alert Message

53. CSS Production Notes

We hope these links are useful for you, as you continue your journey though the web design world. CSS is a powerful tool for you to utilize, and these links should help you in this quest.

The great thing about these links, is that it they are always handy, and always good to have to hand when you design your sites.

Another beautiful thing about CSS is that it allows people to work together, and that is not just web designers. Content managers, and marketers, can all have their say in the design. Ok, this was possible with tables, but so much harder to do. These 53 CSS techniques are to die for.