The Stages of System Analysis and Design of an eCommerce Website
How to get started?
Designing an eCommerce website is certainly the best thing for the website designers, because it allows them to use their creativity to the fullest. Today, the eCommerce website has become the great trend setter and is more associated with the customer's morals and emotions. Every eCommerce website has a USP and something that clinches buyers to visit the website.
Whether it is Amazon, eBay or Alibaba, history tells that every successful eCommerce website has written their own success stories at the time of designing only. All these websites are so popular among the users not just because of their services or the range of products they offer, but because of their great user interface and extremely friendly website design.
Even a person who doesn't know much about the computer or the internet can spend hours on these websites simply because they provide a very friendly design and architect. This signifies how important is the designing and analysis of the eCommerce website.
How does it all start?
Getting started with the design of an eCommerce website is a big challenge for the designers and also for the people who have initiated this idea. Having your own eCommerce store sounds quite resounding, but it takes a hardcore approach to materialize the idea in the real world. Before you began with the designing of your own eCommerce store, you must have the answers of these questions ready, so that you will end up in providing a great product to your audience.
What is the objective of your store?
What would be your target audiences?
In which area or demographics you are targeting your customers?
What products or categories of products you want to sell through your store?
Which major brands you want to associate with?
What would be the initial budget of your store?
Site Architecture and Wire Frame
Now, since you have all the answers ready with you that means you can move ahead and get into the real part of the designing. The site architecture and the wireframe are the most critical part of the eCommerce store. How much you invest your brain and creativity in designing the site architecture will write your success story. History tells that even after investing millions of dollars, many eCommerce stores have failed to get attention from the customers because of their poor architecture and wireframe. Though, you could take every bit of the technology for designing a great friendly UI and website architecture, but your own creativity will be the key to success.
Some of essential and vital elements of a good wire frame and the site architecture
Site Navigation
Site Home Page Feasibility
Menus, Sub Menus and Product Pages
Shopping Cart feature
Secured and fast Payment Gateway
Bradcrumb and Side bars
Header and Footer structure
Visualizing the design
All the great programmers or designers always take the blueprint of their design and use their visualizing skills to create a replica of the design in their minds. This will give them the sheer thought in which way they are moving and isn't they are moving in the right direction. Most of the occasions, during the stage of the wireframe and site architecture, people get diverted from their original ideas and objectives. Here, visualization helps them to end up in a mainframe design that resounds well with their initial idea.
Began with the programming
The zest of the entire design is the programming. Once you have the sound visualization about the theme and concept of your website design, then it's now time to do some ground work and get started with the programming. Doesn't matter which language or framework you are using like Php or.Net, but it is important that programming must go with your initial idea.
The most important part of the programming is the workflow and work management. Designing an eCommerce store is really a tough deal for the programmer because they have to create thousands of pages and embed tons of functionality for designing a great user friendly website.
CMS and Content Delivery Networks
The highly critical part of any website is its database. While designing the eCommerce store, you must give a thought of having a comprehensive and extended database to accommodate all the information on the website. If you don't want to have a static Data Base then you can certainly go with the CDN's (Content Delivery Networks), that will help you in providing an effective database with a good uptime on the server that means your users' will enjoy browsing on your website.
Make precise and good CSS and Java elements
The Cascade Style Sheet or popularly known as CSS will help you in involving the great design elements that will really cherish your users. Every user wants to browse through the website and have their preferences for the various design elements. Be it the font colour, font style, or header colour or may be the colour of your main navigation menu, every CSS design element makes an impact on the users. Like CSS, the Java elements specially the flash images also make a positive impact on the user mindset, but make sure that you must not involve too many javascripts or flash because it may increase the website load time and user doesn't like this.
Uploading products on the website
The products are the zest of every eCommerce store; therefore a special care should be taken while uploading the products on the website. It is really an exhilarating job for the designers, if you are uploading the huge bunch of the products under different categories. Here you should have the high definition images of every single product and those images should be fragmented and processed by a professional designer. Though, it is also important that every image should be compressed before uploading otherwise, it will increase the load time on the server and user won't be able to see the product images properly.
Testing and Launching of the website
Now it's time to launch the website, but before that you must consider your website for testing. Testing is often the final funnel through the website goes before going live on the web. The professional website engineers conduct various tests on the website and suggest better ways to improve the feasibility of the website for the users.
After your website successfully passed through the testing, then it's now time to take your website live on the web for the users with a bang. Make sure that you must consider various display marketing, PCC and digital marketing techniques for promoting your website to the users.
