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Why donate? I want to spend my time directly helping people, like you, by creating and maintaining this website. I do this because it’s a passion of mine – with that said, it’s not cheap running a website these days.

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How to Design an Online Shop

Designing a storefront for your online business does not require a technical expert or a professional designer any more.

There are plenty of web hosting services that provide you with site building and content management software that makes it easy for you to design a site the way you want it and then build up your products or services catalog. You can easily integrate this with shopping cart software and if the hosting service enables you to, you can even start taking online payments.

However, regardless of whether you design your site yourself or get a professional to do it, there are a few points you need to bear in mind.

What you need to bear in mind:

• Keep your site simple but eye-catching, content-rich but well-organized.
  
  
• First impressions are very important when it comes to online stores; your visitor can move onto the next site in a matter of minutes if your site does not load quickly enough or does not grab the visitor’s attention. Keep the home page sufficiently light so that it loads quickly, provide some attractive information like special deals or discounts on the first page and make sure that you select a web hosting service that provides excellent connections to the Internet.
  
  
• Keep the navigation simple – visitors should know where they are and how to proceed to a certain point from anywhere in the site.
  
  
• Provide enough contact information so that visitors know that there is a real person behind the online shop, mention your refund and return policies clearly and mention a customer service number or toll-free number on the top of the page.
  
  
• If there is more than one question that your customer or prospective customers are asking and you do not have the time or the money to invest in support staff, you are better off having a ‘frequently asked questions’ section on your site. Customers who would have otherwise never ventured to buy your product for lack of answers can have their concerns answered and feel more reassured while buying the product.
  
  
• Finally, the graphic identity of the site is also important as you are going to be conveying your message visually by means of your store. With the help of a graphic artist or by using free clip art, create a graphic identity for your online shop and maintain it consistently across all pages of your website.