Planning a Website
The Customer Journey
Think about the route you want your visitor to take to find out about your services. This will help focus your message and help with the site marketing.
There are many different ways you can look at the site map. Usings Themes to break your whole site into sub sections or splitting the message by service/product and visitor type, but whichever way you go, remember the web is here for people.
There are pages you must have, like a thank you page from a contact form, terms and conditions and landing pages you can find out more by following the links.
The "three click principle" is a guide to ensure people can find what they want quickly. They should never be more than 3 clicks away from real content. It's debateable if it really works, but it's a good model to work to when planning a site.
Selling Online
Selling online posses a new range of issues. The first being what kind of shopping cart do you go for.
There are complete hosted eShops, such as the ones you find a oneandone.co.uk, here the whole process is on a completely different server from your website. It's not just the small boys that do this, just take a look at Mothercare and the BBC.
Then you can also have the item pages sitting on you website and link through to a shopping cart. We like this approach, but it does suit every type of business.
Finally, you can do it all yourself on your own webserver. A new Amazon, but this brings up security issues, best to get help from a a professional here.
Whichever approach you take, remember you'll now be governed by UK law and will probably need to link into a Payment Service Provider (PSP).
