Make Money Online With a Zen-Cart Online Store, 2 Decisions For Zen-Cart Website Design – DIY Or Pro
Website design for zen-cart will be one of the first issues you address for your online store. You want your store to be attractive to visitors so they will stay on your site longer and make a purchase or two. Your zen-cart website design is a significant part of your success.
With so many editors and free tutorials available today, almost anyone can create a web page in little or no time. However, there are many factors in the success of an online store that go beyond simply being able to easily do a web page on your own. Zen-cart out-of-the-box does not provide a distinctive design for your store.
Here are components of website design and development that you will need for online success. Some of the items below involve working with the underlying code:
Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
One of the best free ways to get website traffic is when someone finds you while doing a search on Google, Yahoo, MSN or one of the other search engines. Your site will need to be optimized if you are going to show up in search results for your desired keywords or keyword phrases. Another way to say it is that if your website is not optimized for search engines, few people are going to find you when they are searching for the products or services offered on your website.
Copywriting
Writing for the web is not the same as writing for a report, an article or the newspaper. Copywriting to sell products online is very specialized. Also keep in mind that if you simply use the product description that the manufacturer provided, your website will have the same information as everyone else: nothing distinctive.
Overall design, page layout, product display and placement
Simply putting your product on a web page will not lead to a sale. Page layout, product display and the overall design all contribute to making the sale. Even the simplest things, like the color of the “add to cart” button – or where you place it on the page – can make a difference in your sales. In fact, the question of whether to call it “add to cart” or to be different and call it “add to basket” or some other variation can make a difference.
Many make the mistake of believing that you can just copy what you see others doing. That’s why you see so many websites that look alike. However, you have no way of knowing if they are making the kind of profits that you hope to make from your website. Keep in mind that your website will need to be designed to attract and meet the needs of YOUR target market, not someone else’s market.
Conversion Tactics
While it may seem that all online stores work basically the same, to an experienced eye, there are differences that can enhance – or hinder – the sales process. There are many aspects to converting visitors to buyers, and how a zen-cart store is set-up as well as how your products are presented can make a huge difference in your conversion rates. Of course, these are not the only things that impact conversion rates; if you are attracting the wrong visitor to your site just to get traffic, you won’t have good conversion rates, either.
Abandoned shopping carts (where the website visitor puts things into their shopping cart but fails to complete the purchase) are common and knowing how to set-up your website to 1). reduce the number of abandoned shopping carts; and 2). recover the sales from those abandoned carts can be critical to the success of your store.
As you can see, all of the items mentioned above are design factors. During the early days of the Internet these were not issues. Heck, few people were even trying to buy anything online and finding a store with something for sale was such a novelty that the few people looking flocked over and bought. Unfortunately, those days are gone.
Review the information shared in this article, do your research and then decide how best to spend your time. If could be that investing in professional website design is a small price to pay for the online success you desire.
