Business logo
Nowadays logo is absolutely indispensable for business branding. If you do not have your business logo yet you should consider hiring a professional logo design company or an individual designer. Do not try to design your logo by yourself if you are not a professional in graphic design, you’d better discuss your ideas and visions with logo design experts. Logo is the face of your business. No doubt, everyone wants this face to be attractive.

Some e-commerce strategy gurus assert that even presence of a good logo on the site can dramatically increase the number of sales. I personally think that it is somewhat exaggerated but I do believe that a professionally designed logo can make your business more trustworthy, professional and recognizable and hence increase your customer acquisition.

Choosing professional website designers
There is a large number of individual web designers and web designing firms offering their services all around the world. The best recommendation concerning choice of web designers is checking out their portfolio, visiting their previously built websites (in various web browsers) to verify the functionality and overall design, and of course a personal interview with them.

Images and graphics
Images make your website more vivid, interesting and sometimes even “cozy” to stay on. Correct placing of images and graphic elements on your web page can create a necessary atmosphere and feeling about your business. Use only high quality images and graphics for your website and, of course, you cannot use copyrighted images and pictures. Professional graphic designers can do wonders with your website using various images, graphics, photos, collages, banners, flash elements etc. They will make sure the website colors fit your corporate colors and used images do not prevent quick page loading.

Selection of images and graphics depends on type of the online business and target audience. That is why it is important to hire only experienced and professional graphic designers who would take into consideration all necessary factors and web design tendencies to build a customer-appealing website for your online business.

Content Management System (CMS)
After your website being accomplished you may most probably want to get control over your content, product images etc. But what if you do not have a webmaster on your staff and you do not know any web scripting basics to update your website information on regular basis? So if you are planning future growth of your business, it is advisable to consider adding a content management system to your site which allows you to make changes and manage your website on your own without having to hire a webmaster or learn any scripting language. CMS also allows you to grant a limited access to your website content, for example, in case if you want to let other users contribute information to your website.

Blog
A blog can be a powerful marketing too which can bring large amounts of targeted visitors to your website. First of all, a weblog can help you to build long-term relationships with your customers. Constant updating your blog make the customers think they deal with humans, not with a computer. This is a significant psychological aspect every online merchant should take into consideration. Likewise, by writing about your industry you can establish yourself as an trustworthy expert.

Establishing a blog is also one of the methods employed to increase search engine rankings. The thing is that the most popular search engine Google absolutely loves websites with regularly updated content. Since you have an ecommerce store, you most likely will not update your website’s content regularly unless you need to add more products or change/modify products description. That is why it would be wise to have a page which would be updated at least once or twice per week to get “spidered” by Google more often. As you might have guessed you should use the blog to write about things related to your business. Do not use your blog only for constant advertising your company, products and services, instead post interesting and useful information about your industry on the blog. You can write about new product launches, how to’s, industry news, press releases, answers to customers’ questions etc. make sure you put link to important pages on your website with relevant content. Since the more inbound links a web page has, the more changes you have to boost this page’s search engine rank. And this is also the case with your website’s content: the more relevant content you have on your site, the more chances you’ve got to be found in the search engines.

Spending only a few hours per week to create fresh blog posts can bring you increased search engine ranking, increased traffic and increased credibility. Isn’t it worth it?

Post-Design Stage

Marketing and Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
The post-design stage comprehends marketing and search engine optimization procedures. This is the longest and actually a non-stop process. You must constantly do something to outrank your competitors online.

Professionally designing your website and regular publishing of fresh content is only a half job you should do in order to beat your competition. Now you should consider doing the following:

• Follow the competitors’ positions, regularly check out their websites and social media pages, be aware of what their customers like and dislike about them (try to search “review competitor name”, “rate competitor name”; some people even search for derogatory words near the competitors’ names to find out if there any unsatisfied clients and why);
• Register your company account on social media websites like Facebook (create a group and a fan page) and Twitter. Make regular updates with any information concerning your company activity and news. Likewise you can use those social networks for your competitors’ activity research. Ask your good friends and employees if they can share positive information about your company using their personal accounts in social networks and personal blogs;
• Use social bookmaking websites like Stumbleupon, Digg, Mixx, De.licio.us etc. to bookmark your website’s pages containing interesting information. Ask you friends and employees if they could do the same for you;
• Off-page optimization which comprehends article submission, directory submission and non-stop inbound link building (it’s preferably to build links with an anchor text containing your relevant keywords) through your niche blog comments posting and participating in various discussions in forums pertaining to your business niche.

This article contains very brief information outlining some basic stages and steps of your ecommerce website building and optimization process. If you want to learn more, you can either search for more information in the World Wide Web or read other articles on this website. And please, feel free to contact us if you need a professional website designed and developed for your online business.