Most effective layout for the front page?

[SiLPHEED]

What type of main page layout generates the most sales in an ecommerce site. Is it the type that shows you various "specials" or on sale items, or would it be better to make it more of a "showcase" style, which focuses on one product or line of products...OR would it be better to have something that says "welcome ot our store" and lists available categories.

What design Qs are important when creating an ecommerce website?

[jweighell]

Hi SiLPHEED,

I'd have thought that the main focus of the front-page should be on the categories that make up your site as this will give the customer a good overview of everything you have, rather than just focussing on a items.

I'd suggest having special offers contained within the category pages since the fact that you customer has gone to the effort of clicking through to a category obviously shows that they have an interest in that category and therefore the special offers are then better targeted to what they want.

Good luck!

[jweighell]

Oh, and also easy access to a site search is important!

[SiLPHEED]

So you are suggesting something like Ebay does, or most search engine portal sites? How does this affect search engine spiders? Don't they see that as a "link farm" and penalize you for it?

SiL

[andy_boyd]

SE's won't see a list of your categories as a link farm, you won't be penalized for listing your categories. In fact Google actually promotes the idea of a site map in their TOS:

From Google's Guidelines @ [google.com...] - "Offer a site map to your users with links that point to the important parts of your site. If the site map is larger than 100 or so links, you may want to break the site map into separate pages."

I would personally go down the route of a left nav containing links to all your main sections including your help files. I find that most of our customers will make a visit to the 'About Us' page before buying, so you might as well make it easy to get to from and page.

As jweighell said, search is an absolute must! Make your search box big enough so that the average Joe Bloggs doesn't start typing and see the beginning of his query vanish, he'll just get confused and leave. It's preferable to have it up at the top.

Also your utilities like login, view cart and checkout should be up near the top, it's just where people expect it to be.

Best of luck!