Simply Junior

Your Ecommerce website can have all the call-to-action buttons as you like, but this doesn’t mean that customers are going to buy products and services from the site. There are other factors that come into play, when it comes to ensuring that your ecommerce website is able to ‘sell’.

Here are a few tips that can help ensure the success of the ecommerce website design.

Make it Engaging

The design of the commerce website needs to be as engaging as possible. For engagement to occur between the website as a whole and its target customers, integration of certain interactive features is a must. An example of such an interactive feature is enabling customers to offer their reviews of products or services sold by you. While doing so, it’s important that you ensure that both positive and negative are available on the site. There is, of course, a chance that your products or services have only received positive reviews. But, in most cases merchants ensure that only positive reviews are posted on the site. For a website visitor, this doesn’t sound realistic, and usually they feel that such reviews have been fabricated by the merchant. This also has an effect on the levels of engagement. Even if you add this feature, it will be ignored by the website visitor.

Avoid the ‘Ideas’ Clutter

You might have five great ideas for ensuring that the design of your ecommerce website helps sell your products and services. But, integrating all five ideas into the website will just lead to a whole lot of clutter and confusion, for you as well as your prospective customer. For the benefit of your website and its products and services, it’s important that you focus on one idea and not try ten different things to get the attention of your website visitors. You don’t want them to be confused. Say, you want to use a minimalist design for your website, but you also pepper your site with a large number of call-to action-buttons; this lead to design confusion. Your website visitors can get confused and confusion is never good news for any ecommerce website.

Considering these tips will go a long way in making an ecommerce website design doubly effective in ensuring higher sales figures for the website. But, it must be remembered that these are not the only ways in which higher sales can be achieved in an ecommerce website. There are plenty of other designing tips that need to be implemented in order to design a highly effective website design.

Programs like Bank of America’s Keep the Change, Wachovia’s Way2Save, and Capital One’s SmartCents offer easy, hardly noticeable ways to save your money while you’re spending it. They allow customers to boost their savings accounts without altering their day-to-day behavior. Seems like a great deal – but how do you know if one of these programs is right for you? As in all things, the happiest customer will be the one whose expectations are set correctly at the outset. With that in mind, we’ve compiled a list of four simple rules you should follow when researching debit card-based saving programs. Read on to learn more.

Rule #1: It Won’t Make You Rich

On average, customers who enroll in a debit-linked saving program save $120-$150 annually. If your goal is to save a few hundred dollars for a purchase or a contribution to your summer vacation fund, slow build-up of a moderate nest egg may be an ideal solution for you. Programs like Bank of America’s Keep the Change and Wachovia’s Way2Save offer attractive account-opening bonuses, high-interest bonuses, and matches on saved funds throughout the first year of account activity – so while they won’t make you rich, you’ll at least turn a tidy profit.

If your goal is to build significant capital, however, you are always better off investing your money where you cannot spend it (e.g., a company-sponsored 401K plan or a CD or money market fund). Ultimately, the size of your reward depends on the frequency of your debit card usage. Of course, the flip side of high debit card usage is high spending – which leads us to our next rule.

Rule #2: It Might Encourage You to Overspend

Since the rewards (i.e., the savings) are tied to your spending habits, you may be tempted to use your debit card more frequently to transfer more funds to your savings account. Ultimately, such behavior may lead you to spend more than you intended, or even spend more than you save. Adjusting your spending habits to accrue rewards only makes sense if the adjustment benefits you, and not just your bank. Always keep in mind that banks are not altruists, and they are not encouraging you to save just for savings’ sake. Every time you deposit funds into your savings account, the bank makes money. Make sure you’re in control of your spending and saving habits and not allowing them to be dictated by a bank that is most interested in bringing about a behavior desirable to their bottom lines.

You should be particularly mindful of overusing your debit card if you are carrying credit card debt. If your credit card has a balance on it, your payments might have interest rates as high as 30 percent. Placing your money into a low-interest savings account, rather than using it to pay off your debt, does not earn you more than you owe.

However, if

(1) you pay off your credit card in full each month
(2) your debit card is your go-to card of choice

You won’t be tempted by the fallacy of spending more to save more a debit-linked saving program offers minimal downside.

Rule #3: Hidden Fees Can Cost You

While banks may promote their savings programs as free, you may find that gratis service is based on you meeting your end of the bargain. You may be required to:

* Maintain an account balance above a minimum threshold (Bank of America’s Keep the Change requires a minimum $300 balance to avoid a $5 monthly maintenance fee)

* Transfer funds from checking to saving each month in addition to the funds you deposit through your standard debit card usage (Bank of America’s Keep the Change requires you to deposit a minimum of $25 monthly into your savings account)

* Make a debit card purchase once per month or pay an online bill once per month to avoid a servicing fee (Wachovia’s Way2Save charges customers who do not meet this minimum threshold)

If your spending and saving behavior places you comfortably, and without adjustment, within the restrictions set by your selected program, then these monthly maintenance fees may never haunt you. But it’s always better to know about them ahead of time than to face an unpleasant surprise later on.

Rule #4: Privacy is Paramount

We’ve all heard that debit cards are generally not as secure as credit cards – so do we expose ourselves to unnecessary risk and the possibility of debit card fraud if we link those cards to our savings accounts?

The answer is yes and no. It goes without saying that by managing your finances online, you are exposing personal information – such as your name, address, phone number, and bank account – to a potential security breach. The risks don’t seem to be any greater for debit-linked savings programs than they are for online banking as a whole – but if the risk of online banking are enough to deter you, then you may want to steer clear of these programs as well.

If you are committed to opening a spend-to-save account, you can at least minimize your security risks by taking the following actions:

* Never send your savings account details by email
* Beware of emails that ask you to follow a link to a website and input details for verification (they’re usually fraudulent)
* Always log out of your online account when finished – especially when you’re transacting in a public place
* Ignore the “remember my password option” on your bank’s web site
* Contact the fraud department at your bank immediately to cancel your card and your savings program if you find that your information has been compromised or that your card has been used fraudulently

Managed Hosting is a type of web hosting. The main selling point is that it is, as the name suggests, managed for you. This means that you will not have to worry about the hosting of your website.

One of the major advantages is that this worry is taken away from you. It is the responsibility of the hosting company to make sure that your website hosting is taken care of and that any problems are quickly sorted out. You staff do not have to think about the hosting, meaning they can get on with their own jobs. This allows you to focus on your business instead of keeping an eye on your website all of the time. This sees a potential cost taken away as well. If your hosting needs a lot of attention then you will need to employ IT staff with knowledge in that area. If you choose a managed hosting package, though, your payroll costs will be reduced. Managed Hosting does costs of course, but it may be cost effective compared to employing your own staff. A hosting company specialises in hosting so will already have staff performing these tasks on many different sites, so they may be able to offer it cheaper.

With Managed Hosting you can be safe in the knowledge that your hosting is in safe hands. The hosting company’s staff will have extensive expertise in hosting, and therefore will know what they are doing. If you are performing most of the hosting tasks yourself this will not be the case. If you are a solicitors firm for example, then you may not have the expertise to sort out all your hosting needs. Having a Managed Hosting package will means you can get on with your job as a solicitor. This means you can do your own job better, as can everyone else within your organisation, and this could lead to a more successful business.

For a website to be successful there needs to be minimal downtime. Downtime means that the system is unavailable and potential visitors will be unable to view your website. Every website will have some downtime but it should be as little as possible. A good Managed Hosting company will make sure downtime is rarely a problem. They will always be keeping a check on your website so will be able to sort out any problems that result in downtime. Other problems with the hosting will also be resolved timely. As you probably do not have the time to keep checking there are no such issues, this is another advantage of this type of hosting.

As with all types of hosting, there are some disadvantages. It can be expensive. As mentioned above, you can save money if you would otherwise need to employ extra staff, but if it is only fairly basic hosting you require then it may prove to be unnecessarily expensive. It all depends on the specifics you require. The costs are significantly more than unmanaged hosting.

The other main negative is that you will not have overall control of your hosting. Some people prefer to be hand on, but with Managed Hosting you are handing this control over to the hosts.

These are the only real negatives of Managed Hosting but they can be important ones. If you do not have the needs for this advanced type of hosting, then it is completely unnecessary, and could turn out to be a waste of money. There are much cheaper options available, so it all depends on whether you would need to employ your own staff and whether you need the extra’s and support offered by Managed Hosting. If you do have the expertise and want control of your hosting but still need it to be hosted by someone else, then there are other hosting options available that would suit you better.

Whether or not Managed Hosting is for you all depends on the type of website that you have, and whether the all round package suits you and your site.

Andrew Marshall

Dedicated servers are something that many website owners here discussed often in chat rooms and on website support forums. While many new website owners will sign up for a shared hosting plan business owners that are affordable and maintained by a web hosting company other owners have invested in dedicated servers. A dedicated server is a server that is used by only one company for their website or websites. In the past owning a dedicated server was extremely expensive and required a lot of maintenance and technology knowledge.

These days having a dedicated server is much easier and a bit more affordable than it was a few years ago. Web hosting companies that previously offered only shared servers have now made dedicated servers available to their customers. This allows users to sign up for a hosting account the same way that they always have only now they will not be sharing a server with other account holders. The price for this service is more expensive than a shared hosting plan but still much more affordable than purchasing and managing private equipment. In addition to being more affordable investing in a dedicated server that is maintained by a third party is much more convenient. Neither you nor your staff has to worry about constantly monitoring your new server for downtime or errors. The web hosting company will perform the exact same support and troubleshooting services as they always have.

There are many benefits to having a dedicated server but the primary benefit in most website owners’ eyes is that they no longer have to fear downtime being caused by another website owner’s site. Many website owners do not realize that when sharing a server their site is in the hands of many other website owners who may not be very knowledgeable or responsible. Poorly designed sites with bad coding and other problems have led to entire servers crashing. Even if a sites coding does not disrupt the server, the sites traffic can sometimes lead to problems.

Many shared hosting plans limit the bandwidth being used by each account that is using the server in question. The web hosting company will either charge heavy fees for overuse or temporarily limit access to a site if it has exceeded a certain bandwidth amount. Unfortunately there are always times when a web hosting company does not notice an overage until it has already caused a server failure. This sometimes happens when a website uploads new content or starts a new traffic campaign that leads to a sudden burst of traffic. When a server is down your company will be penalized as traffic and potential customers are lost when they reach a site that is not active.

To avoid downtime and errors that are caused by shared hosting it is best to invest in a dedicated server. Dedicated servers are perfect for website owners that simply cannot afford to be down often and for website owners that expect a lot of traffic daily. Having a dedicated server will not only cut down on downtime, it will also make your website load faster and work more efficiently for your visitors.