Ecommerce Website Building Tips for Beginner Merchants
Date: November 10th, 2020
How to Choose the Best Hosting Package to Build a Website
Narrowing down to the best web hosting package for your needs may be challenging, especially in a market flooded with different service providers, products, and so much stuff that it may seem like one needs an IT degree to select the right hosting package. Follow these steps to pick the best Hosting package to build a website.
1.Understand what you want.
The first tip to picking the correct hosting package is to know exactly what you want. What kind of website do you want to build? What resources do you require? How many visitors do you expect to browse your site each day? But if you’re a newbie to the site building jargon, then it’s best to start small. It is easy to upgrade to a better hosting package so it makes no sense spending on what your site won’t need? What’s more, consider a plan that’s straightforward; the most significant advantage of shared hosting, other than cost, is its user-friendliness. So, why go for a package that leaves you all the problematic work when there are friendly solutions.
2.Hosting Package Features.
The hosting features of the package you select matters. Do they offer you unlimited bandwidth? How many domains can your package host? Because this is the most challenging part of the process, web hosts offer different sets of features in one plan. When planning to build a website, compare what each provider offersto gauge the standard market price. Furthermore, look if your host offers any additional features and see who provides more valuable extras than the other. Don’t go for a long list of worthless features.
3.Compare Hosting Prices.
The fact that you’re working on a slim budget doesn’t mean looking for the lowest price. Looking around, you’ll notice hosts differ significantly in prices. Also, remember to check renewal rates as you look at the initial signup cost. Ecommerce website hosts charge a starting rate during the first term which they then increase upon renewal. It is wise to go with a package that fits your budget—today and in future.
4.Control Panel.
Different hosts have a different name for this, but it is the feature that enables you to manage certain aspects of your site by yourself. At the minimum, your control panel should allow you: change account passwords and add, manage & delete email addresses. It makes no sense signing up for a service where you have to contact technical support every time you forget a password time or manage email accounts.
5.Technical support.
The technical support should run 24/7 all year around. You don’t want a host that doesn’t offer support on public holidays or weekends. Plus, be sure to confirm how supportive the team is and how competent they are in their job? You need almost instant response all the time. Lastly, check out the reputation of your host by going through reviews to see what other website owners say about them.
Build a Website like a Pro: The 3 Steps to Create a Professional Ecommerce Website.
A sleek, compelling design and mouth-watering content alone cannot push your website to attain the kind of success you dream of. Rather, your site needs to be styled to attain maximum user-friendliness and functionality while being straightforward and easy to understand from the first glance. This means you are not going to blindly follow the slogan that goes “Beauty lies in the eye of the mouse-holder.” Instead, you are going to build a professional website based on the following ground rules.
1.Keep a clutter-free and straightforward homepage.
Users rarely read everything they find on a site. Normally, they scan pages singling out keywords and sentences they feel are important to them. With these user habits in mind, you stand a better chance if you concentrate on appealing to emotions instead of word count. A visitor will easily make up what’s going on a website that’s less wordy, has simple wording and requires less clicking to navigate. While some Text and Call To Action are a requirement, be sure to break these up with prominent subheadings and understandable paragraphs. But most importantly, add your company logo and a large image that communicates your point.
2.Add Readable Web Content.
“Readability” in this case refers to the measure of how easy it is for visitors to spot words, phrases, and sentences. A site with high readability attracts users to efficiently scan it and absorb the info in the text without much ado.
Here are tips to build a website with excellent readability:
- Check on Contrast: be sure to have sufficient contrast between the background and text so that the text is visible.
- Check font: Use sans Serif instead of Serif fonts. These are the best fonts for web texts.They are less fancy and curvy, unlike the serifs.
- Visible font size: Use fonts that are visible depending on the interface you expect visitors to view your site. Don’t go for tiny fonts, if anything, medium or large fonts are better than small fonts as no one will complain of visible text.
3.Make an easy-to-navigate Website.
Website navigation should be made as trouble-free as possible. You don’t want to have users hunting or wandering your site to get whatever info they want.
Here’s how to improve the navigation experience for your visitors:
- Add your business logo to your homepage: this will tell your visitors who you are at first glance.
- Carefully plan your menu: Place it in the top section of your site –preferably in the header and have the sections structured based on their order of importance.
- Make vertical navigation easier: for long-scrolling sites, try to add an anchor menu that allows viewers to “back to top” or “jump to”
- Add an informative footer: because this is the last thing a visitor sees on your homepage, be sure to provide all key links there. Also add terms of use, FAQs, contact info, etc.
Lastly, you don’t want to be online and not mobile friendly in an era that depends largely on smartphones. Pay attention to your mobile site practices to ensure your visitor enjoys on their smartphone the same excellent browsing they experience on their PC.
Your Google Ranking Matters: 4 Link Building Strategies for Your Campaign After gathering resources to build a website, growth and maintenance follows, and link-building is an excellent place to start. Link building is a critical part of online success and one proven way to achieve better search engine rankings. In fact, forget about ranking top 10 on Google if your website has zero links. What’s more, links are these days a primary part of good SEO and a common characteristic of all top-ranking content on any search engine. They give more power to the pages Google ranks as authoritative. On any day, Google will rank a page with more links as authoritative. And that’s the cause of the problem; every website owner is looking for more links. So where are you supposed to get links when almost every counterpart is requesting for links? How do you go about it? Well, here are link-building tips that work for you this 2018.
1.Make the most of Broken Links.
Many websites lead users to an error page when they click certain links. While this can be annoying to users, it could be the perfect chance to build a link. You can easily replace the broken link with another that lands readers on your page. But first, you must approach the sites leading to the error pages. And chances are; they’ll agree because the deal is a win-win for both parties—you get a link and the site gets to fix the error page. Also, you benefit readers because they get to land on a relevant page other than an on error 404. Interestingly, you can always go broken-link hunting anytime you want thanks to tools like Screaming Frog, Xenu Link Sleuth, and Ahrefs.
2.Contributing quality content to related sites.
Content contribution helps build a website as it earns you more backlinks from counterpart sites. So when picking partners to link with, be sure to go for relevant and high-ranking websites related to your business. Plus, don’t compromise on content quality just because these pieces are not to be posted on your site. Make sure whatever you contribute is relevant. And apart from adding your link on the author-bio segment check to see if you can include one or two natural links. In a nutshell, having valuable content published on a renowned website pulls more traffic to your site.
3.Blog Commenting.
Commenting on blogs that discuss matters relevant to your business is still a valid link-building tactic. Just ensure the blogs you comment on to attract good traffic as well as great engagement. What's more, go through the blog to see if there’s already a reasonable number of active users adding their opinions. You can assign this task to someone who will ensure every comment they post adds substantial value to the topic. Then you can find a way to place links on your blog comments. However, it should look like you’re marketing your brand.
4.Reviews and Testimonials.
Just as with dead links, testimonial and review link-building is advantageous for both parties; you and the site you add reviews too. It is a practice among businesses to invite users to offer feedback on their service or product quality. Why not use this window to get at least a backlink and draw potential traffic to your website. These four tricks are never fading, at least not anytime soon. Make them part of campaigns to enjoy higher rankings.
Final Words
Follow these tips to build a website that will meet your needs, and attract & convert as many prospects as possible.