Web design for a competitive business isn't easy, especially when you add e-commerce (the buzzword for buying and selling online) to the mix. Thankfully, many service providers have basic web hosting templates available to their customers at little to no cost depending on your package. More complex templates can be quite expensive. Companies that provide hosting with templates make setting up and maintaining an e-commerce website possible for people without the expertise to do it themselves and without the money to hire a professional to design their site from the ground up.

When purchased separately from your web hosting package, a template can run anywhere from $20 for a basic, simple web template and well into the hundreds of dollars for a more complex, custom design. For the majority of small business owners, basic templates designed for businesses are usually a safe bet.

An e-commerce template may include basic pages, search and navigation tools such as a virtual shopping cart, but it will be up to you to find your own online payment processing - most often through a third party provider such as PayPal. A web search for "online payment processing" will provide you with several options.

As an alternative, you might want to consider a turnkey solution such as eBay Stores or Yahoo! The designs of sites like these make e-commerce solutions for small business accessible to everyone. Be sure to read the find print about transaction fees and other costs before you decide.

Questions to Ask about Functionality

1. Does the shopping cart accept debit cards and online checks?
2. Is there a limit to the number of products, services or categories you can set up?
3. Does the site offer automatic notification of orders and transactions?

Questions to Ask about Cost

1. What are the basic monthly fees?
2. Are fees charged on a per transaction basis?
3. Is there a setup fee? If so, what is it?
4. How are taxes handled?

Talk to other business owners about their choices and do your homework. The right solution is out there for you, you just have to be willing to do what it takes to find it!

Here are the simple ABC's of web development.

A. Graphics

Graphics is very essential in web development because this is what visitors gauze your site if it is worthy of their time.

So what really makes a graphic to be effective?

First, the graphic should be small. Consider using images that are 10 to 12 KB per image because if you will use larger images, it will slow down your site.

Visitors to your site will likely to leave if your site takes too long to display so it is better that you use images that are attractive and easy to load.

Second, when it comes to graphics, you have to use images that have direct relation to your site. You would not display an image of Hollywood artist to promote the product you are selling, as this will cause confusion to your visitors.

Lastly, blinking graphics are not ideal in web development because blinking objects are really annoying and distract readers. More often readers leave web sites with excessive flash or blinking objects most especially when these objects hinder them from reading the whole web page.

B. Advertising

Advertising is lifeline of web sites and you have to handle them effectively to ensure success of your site.

When in comes to advertising, you have to remember two things, the number of ads and how related it is to your site.

The number of ads should be just enough to give room to other contents of your site. If they are overlapping contents of your site, then maybe that is why your site lags behind in web searches.

Next, you should only post ads that related to products or services offered. If they are related, your readers will likely to open the links to your ads but if they are not related the ads might not be opened.

In the end ads generate income but if they are driving your visitors away, then maybe its time to remove some of your ads and just stick the ones that are related to the content of your site.

C. Web Content

Content is also another essential factor in success of your site. It will be better if you have articles that your visitors can read on a daily or almost weekly basis.

Informative content will likely to increase your visitors as they will bookmark your site and then send your links to other friends and family members to invite them to visit your site as well. But for others to recommend your site, you really have to offer not just ads or graphics but rich and informative content.

For example, you are selling a product, it will be better if the site not just offer the products but also give tips on "how to-" like how to choose, how to use and where to buy.

Meanwhile, if you are maintaining a web blog, make sure that the site is readable and the topics being discussed are really interesting.

Ten years ago you could include a hit counter on your website and announce proudly that your site was doing "very well" as soon as the number reached 100,000. The current process is not nearly as simple or straightforward. The internet works in complicated ways that have evolved to solve a number of small problems. Consequently, concrete statistics are often difficult to obtain. If you believe the number of online visitors is a reliable indicator to gauge the popularity of your site or the potential sales of your product, you should consider the following:

1. Hit - Every time a user requests a file on your site (a page, not a picture or link to another site) it counts as a hit.

2. File - When a file or page is actually sent to the user, it counts as a file. Files normally outnumber hits, but neither is very useful in measuring traffic. Any IP can request all of the files on your page several times in one hour without any actual involvement from the user.

3. Impressions - This is a concept that has existed in advertising for many decades. For example, a 2-page magazine advertisement counts as one "showing of a creative concept". This equates to one impression every time a reader sees it. If your web page contains five small banners, you could have 10,000 page views, but 50,000 impressions.

4. Page Views - Almost everyone believe this is the most important traffic statistic. This term simply refers to the number of times any particular page has been viewed. This metric can be useful. However, values can often be over-inflated and should always be considered in conjunction with unique visits.

5. Visits & Unique Visits - A visit is simply logged every time a remote IP requests one of your pages for the first time in a timeout period. A unique visit is usually defined as "one visit per IP per day", regardless of timeouts.

The above are all very important metrics, but understanding them properly is key. The best way to decide how your site's traffic is performing is by creating a formula. If you know what you are doing, you can develop your own formula. However, there are plenty of effective formulas currently available. A basic idea of how to evaluate your traffic involves reviewing monthly averages, unique visits and page views. This will give you an idea regarding how many individuals visit your site, how many pages they view, and how long they remain.

A basic formula from MarketingExperiments.com would be:

C = 4M + 3V + 2(I-F) - 2A

This formula shows that conversions are a product of motivation (M), value (V) and then the friction (F) elements minus the incentives (I). This will help you determine how many customers are likely to purchase your product. However, you need all the values first! You can purchase online analytic tools or download them for an upfront or monthly fee. All of them can return useful data to a webmaster.

If you are not an expert webmaster, or you do not understand many of the technical intricacies of web traffic, you should download Google Analytics. This is one of Google's new free products, and all you require is a GMail account and a web site. The program provides easy to read analytic data in a web-based form for your website. This can make it easy to determine which metrics would be most useful for analyzing your online traffic.

Michael Ehlert
RevUpYourWebBusiness.com