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This is meant to be a framework for creating an ecommerce product page. There are of course many additional things that could be put on a product page, but these are the essentials that every page should have. The more features that a product page has, the more likely a user won’t notice them.

In the end, websites benefit from clean and well organized content.

Google Suggested that I drive over a pass called Schofield pass. While this could be just any old pass, but it’s not.

Schofield Pass is one of the most dangerous roads in Colorado. It is a 7ft wide rocky mess of a trail with a 500ft cliff on one side and a solid rock wall on the other. It has been called the most dangerous pass in Colorado, and boasts a near-vertical 27% grade in some places. Over 20 people have perished on it in past 30 years. Just a few months ago we saw an abandoned Suburban on it, who’s owner thought it safer to forget about his vehicle than to risk the descent. Until cleaned up in the recent years, the river below was littered with the remains of Jeeps, and Trucks that didn’t make it. Oh, and going up is 100x harder than going down, which is what Google Maps was suggesting.

Here’s a Youtube Video that shows very well, just how bad Schofield Pass pass is. At about 1 minute in, things start to get interesting:

So I got to thinking, how many similar passes in Colorado could Google be suggesting people to use. I found an additional 2, very dangerous passes, in about 5 minutes of looking.

Pearl Pass is the first, and Ophir Pass is the second.

Just a small section of Pearl Pass:

Ophir pass is the easiest:

Now all of these routes are in somewhat obscure locations, but the areas that surround them are visited by millions of tourists every year. It would be extremely easy for someone to pull up direction for a scenic drive on google maps, and …

So if you are a software, information, or anything else company, it may be a good idea to make sure your program isn’t gearing up to kill somebody. Based on the usage, I would bet that Google Maps has already done so somewhere!

I tried to make a purchase from them this morning, and much to my astonishment, I couldn’t log into my account. I was sent into an infinite loop between their image verification and log-in scripts. After some investigating, I concluded they are now requiring Firefox users to have network.http.sendRefererHeader set to 1. Many Firefox users, myself and every computer in my company included, set this value to zero, which prevents websites from seeing where you came from. To me this is simply a privacy concern, as it’s nobody else’s business but my own to know the last website I visited. Some anti-spyware software automatically set this value as well, so you may not even know if your is set to zero.

7. If you are using Firefox, type “about:config” in the address bar. Set the “network.http.sendRefererHeader” value to 1.

By requiring the value, newegg is completely preventing a huge number of Firefox users from using their site, and subsequently becoming customers. Not only is this unneeded and is most likely due to some corporate idiot that thinks they can add to the bottom line by tracking users better, but this is an unacceptable coding practice. They have currently lost me as a customer (I can honestly say that it is a sizable loss).

If you own an ecommerce site, don’t ever make changes and requirements that force your customers to lower their privacy standards or lower their browser security. I promise that you will lose customers as a result of making changes like this. This is completely fixable, but at the expense of your own privacy. I’m surprised that newegg would do this given that a huge number of their customers, if not the majority, are tech savvy shoppers who are likely to also block referrers.

A contact form is a seemingly simple feature, that most websites mess up. While a broken or poorly designed contact form may not be the end-all problem with a website, there’s no reason that it shouldn’t work correctly.

What a contact for must contain:

1. Name, email, (optional: phone), and message fields
2. Shouldn’t Contain… A ridiculous captcha verification script
3. Confirmation / feedback that the form was properly submitted
4. An email response that the form was successfully received
5. Finally… A response from someone that read the form (If necessary)

1.) Name, email, and message fields.

This is the one part that is rarely messed up, but often far overdone. A phone field is often useful but you will rarely need an address or any anything more personal than a person’s name, email, phone, and whatever they want to tell you. This is not a application form, it is a contact form! You shouldn’t be trying to qualify your customer in some way with a contact form.

The more fields a customer has to fill out, the less likely they will use your contact form, and the more likely they will call you for something that can be handled over email.

An example of a horrible contact form!

2.) Shouldn’t Contain… A ridiculous captcha verification script!

Captcha scripts can help reduce email spam from bots and automated programs designed to spam you. They also make it a complete pain to get through. Captcha itself is virtually impossible to get through at this point.

Use alternatives that are actually readable or ones that make a user solve a simple math problem to proceed, or use nothing if spam isn’t a huge problem.

USE THIS:

NOT THIS:

Requiring anyone to decipher an unreadable image of text is not a proactive customer service approach and will undoubtedly end with frustrated and confused customers.

3. ) Confirmation / feedback that the form was properly submitted.

DO NOT, DO NOT, DO NOT simply dump your customer into another page or refresh the form itself without a clear message that the form was submitted. This is a sure way to get multiple emails from your customer, each successive one showing more frustration than its predecessor.

Ideally, you should have a dedicated thank you, or confirmation page that the user is redirected to once the form is submitted. This is a better method than displaying an in-line message on the same page because there is no question that the form was properly submitted. This is one area where Web 2.0 is killing usability, because on-page changes are very often hard to detect and are not what a user is expecting.

It’s also a good idea to include links to informational pages, FAQ’s, and other areas of your website that could answer a question that a customer might have.

4.) An email response that the form was successfully received.

More than half the sites that I ever have contacted do not provide immediate email response when using their contact form.

You should always provide an immediate confirmation email that the message has been received. This will reiterate the response in the previous step, and makes your business look much more professional. Even a generic message is much better than no message. The message is a great time to provide alternate / emergency contact information in case they really need to get a hold of you, or provide links to FAQ and informational pages about your services or website.

You can setup a automated email response on just about any web server. It’s free and takes no human interaction to send an automated response email. There’s simply no reason not to send one.

6.) Finally… A response from someone that read the form (If necessary).

I put this on here because a huge number of customer inquiries are never responded to. Actually get back to your customer, by email, phone or whatever method you can. You don’t need to reply to spam, but you’re probably in business because you have customers. Providing unmatched response times is one of the best ways to set yourself apart from your competitors. Seriously, shoot for five or ten minutes during normal working hours.

Only when you customers reply with “wow that was fast”, is your response time prefect!

Contact forms are a cornerstone of online customer service and there’s absolutely no reason to mess them up. Stick with these steps and you can’t go wrong.

Mistake 1 (Old dates and information):

The internet is a very dynamic machine. When a visitor shows up on your website and sees your copyright date “Copyright © Anything < This Year” it instantly brings up questions. Are these prices still correct? Is this company even in business?

Unless your website has an enormous amount of perceived trust and you have a very strong brand (in which case your copyright date would most definitely be current), you will undoubtedly lose sales from this date alone.

The same thing goes for about us pages, and other information pages that can be date specific. If your about us page states that you specialize in computers with Windows 98, and Windows 2000 while Windows Vista is the current release, it brings up questions to which there is no good answer.

Mistake 2 (SSL related error messages):

I come across sites on a daily basis that serve up secure pages with some problem in their SSL configuration. When you send a visitor to a SSL protected page, there is a good reason for it. And, when an error message precedes that secure connection, all confidence in your security is lost. If you can’t figure out how to properly encrypt a website / page / sub-domain without errors, you need to hire someone who can.

Does this make you want to continue checking out?

Also, to help prevent this from ever happening, make sure you do not permanently install mis-configured ssl certificates. If you do get a ssl error, make sure not to click the permanently allow this connection option.

Mistake 3 (Not showing payment and shipping options immediately):

You should display your accepted payment methods on every page of your website! Don’t make your customer click on the about us, faq, or any other link to get this information. I’ve got securely hosted credit card logos here, if you need them.

You should display the shipping options and prices as soon as technically possible, on the shopping cart page is best! Also, do not make your user enter all of their shipping or billing information, (or worse yet, make them register) before you give them shipping prices. Much of the time, your customer won’t even consider filling out that much information just to get an idea of how much shipping will cost.

Use a single zip field to calculate shipping and ask for the rest of their information further in the checkout process.

Mistake 4 (Improper add-to-cart functions):

With the Web 2.0 craze going on, it’s common to see spiffy Ajax and dynamic add to cart functions where some small area of the website is updated when an item is added to a shopping cart. This is not only a bad idea, but it can be usability suicide.

While these actions may seem obvious to you, a lot of users don’t notice a small box being updated, and it’s rarely what a shopper is expecting to happen. It’s always best to redirect your user to a shopping cart each time they add something to it. You can then provide a return to last item / category / brand or whatever else link from the shopping cart page as needed.

Mistake 5 (Poor internal search):

Google became popular because their search results were quick, and highly relevant. Search function on your website is extremely important, and should be quick and relevant. You need to be able to account for things like misspellings and incomplete words. If you don’t have the ability to implement a solid search function yourself, you should look for a 3rd party application to use. If your website is well indexed, Google offers a custom search engine that you can integrate into your website.

The only thing worse than showing bad search results is showing none at all.

Common methods to obfuscate email addresses:

• Encoding
• Javascript
• Flash
• Using an Image instead of text

Javascript and Flash obfuscation basically create a text version of your email that cannot be read by all but the most complex email harvesting robots. These methods work well at stopping email harvesting (Flash is far better than Javascript), but your visitors must have flash installed or javascript enabled for these to work or they too cannot see your email address.

Example of what a Javascript email would look like to a computer. (From: seowebsitepromotion.com)
<script type="text/javascript">
//<![CDATA[
var email = "questions"
var domain = "ecommerce-blog.org"
document.write("" + email + "@" + domain + "")
//]]>
</script>

These can also be called externally or through an action script which is even more effective.

Images of an email address can be used in place of text. While this is probably as effective at stopping spam as flash and Javascript, it completely prevents copying the text. This makes it very annoying to try and email the site owner as contact addresses are often long and can be complex. Users are very prone to mis-entering email characters and this generally leads to frustration and annoyance by everyone. I recommend not using this method.

Encoding is by far my preferred method of email obfuscation. While it is not as effective as the other methods, it stops the majority of spambots. It does not create browser compatibility or usability issues. It is as easy to use as copying and pasting some html onto a web-page when it is being created.

Encoding can be done with a hex, decimal, and others. HTML interprets these encoded characters as the ones we see and read. This way your visitors sees an A while a computer sees an A.

Some good encoding tools:
http://www.ianr.unl.edu/email/encode/ – This is a simple and very effective encoding generator.
http://www.seowebsitepromotion.com/obfuscate_email.asp This script offers a variety of encoding and javascript obfuscation techniques.

Email Obfuscation Comparison:

Does Macy’s really think that they are so important that I will wait, just to see their website?

They without question lost this sale, and if for some reason they think that this doesn’t reflect negatively on their retail presence as well, they can think again. I can understand a website being down, or messed up, or slow, but asking someone to wait until some other shopper leaves, is ludicrous. I think that Ticketmaster is the only other ecommerce site that can top all others in poor usability.

Please don’t ever do anything to hinder your customer’s ability to simply view your site. This includes intro pages, required registration, full-page advertisements, and now waiting for other shoppers to leave.

Basically, when you click on a link one the MSN homepage, nothing happens. When you click a second time (Length of time to the second click is irrelevant) the link opens. Originally I thought that I was going crazy or just wasn’t able to perform the seemingly simple task of clicking on a link, to which I do for 12 – 14 hours a day. After spending time on several computers at my office and further confirming it on my laptop, and two home computer, and a computer at another residence, I am confident that the msn.com page is the problem and not these computers of Firefox.

Msn.com seems to work fine in IE7, but I and i haven’t tested it in Opera or Safari, so I’m not sure if they’re broken as well.

Here’s a quick video of the problem: (Last click is a double-click)

Anyway, nothing of immense importance, but it definitely bugs the hell out of me when companies deceptive or poor coding practices break the normal operation of the internet.

There is more to making a website faster than just the size of pages or html. Sometimes just changing where a script is called can make more of a difference in website loading time than reducing the overall page size by 50%. Here are a few tricks to speed up the actual loading time of a website without making major changes to the website itself. These are very effective and can be implemented on most websites in just a few minutes.

1. Validate and optimize your CSS
2. Optimize your javascript code
3. Call your external scripts in your footer instead of your <head>

Validate and optimize your CSS
By default, css is loaded on a visitors first access to your website and then cached so it doesn’t need to reload with each page request. For this reason, a visitor’s first page view will also take the longest to load, but subsequent page views will be much quicker.

First, make sure that your css doesn’t have any major errors, or browser incompatibility issues. Often css validation will let you onto errors or superficial code that is wasting up bandwidth and doing nothing for your website or your visitors. Now assuming that everything checked out OK, or you fixed anything that was likely to cause major problems, you can now optimize.

I recommend using this css optimization tool, and use ‘High’ compression. This will reduce the size of your css scripts, but they will still be readable. The highest setting will further reduce the size, but you will not be able to easily read the css, and future editing becomes difficult. Also, the default options are sufficient for most css applications.

It’s not uncommon to be able to reduce your css file size by 50% or more, which can greatly reduce that first page load time.

Optimize your javascript code
Unlike css, javascript code is not cached, so every time a page loads the javascript will also be loaded into your visitor’s browser. It is even more important to reduce your script file sizes, since they are called every time a page is loaded.

Before you go optimizing all of your javascript I highly recommend backing it up. This will allow you to edit it in the future, and will also provide backup in case optimizing it breaks it’s functionality.

Use this javascript optimizer to optimize your javascript code. Replace your existing code with the output from this script, and try to use external javascript instead of in-line javascript wherever you can.

Call your external scripts in your footer instead of your <head>
You do not need to call most javascript scripts in your header, even though this is common practice. By calling javascript in your <head> section, the javascript file must completely load before any <body> content is displayed. Large javascript files can completely break usability for dial-up users, and even broadband users will notice lag.

The answer in many cases, is to call your external javascript files at the bottom of your html just above the </body> tag. By doing this, your content loads before your javascript, and you eliminate the loading lag seen with large script files. It’s not uncommon for a site’s content to be virtually instant, from several second of a blank page before the change was made. This is truly one of the best ways to speed up the first content being displayed on a visitor’s screen.

This does not work will all scripts depending on their exact function, so do some testing in different browsers to make sure that the script still functions properly before fully switching to this format.

Final thoughts
If you do any of these, thoroughly test your website in different browsers to make sure than nothing unexpected occurs. Here is a great tool to measure the size of a web page but in reality far more goes into loading time, than size alone.

Personal:

1. Wear a suit to the office.
2. Optimize your computer monitor situation.
3. Make a daily schedule, and stick to it.
4. Work on one task at a time.
5. Outsource if you can’t do something yourself.

For your website:

1. Make very good use of FAQ and self help pages.
2. Properly integrate and automate payment methods on your website.
3. Make sure you are using a good website host.
4. Optimize advertising landing pages.
5. Optimize your website’s structure and navigation.

Personal Productivity

1.) Wear a suit to the office:
This one may seem a little arcane, especially if you work out of your home, but wearing a suit or at least business acceptable clothing when you work has several positive affects. When you are wearing your work clothing, you are at work. More psychological than anything else, it will separate your work from your personal obligations, and help keep you on task. If you keep the mindset that when you are at work you do only business and not personal tasks, it will further help the suit effect.

This will also keep you comfortable and used to wearing business clothing. This is especially important for people who visit trade-shows or industry conferences where business attire is appropriate.

2.) Optimize your computer monitor situation:
If you take no other advise than this, get a second monitor for your computer. I can’t think of anything that will increase your computer productivity more than a second monitor. Personally, I keep my email and other semi-static programs on my right monitor and use my left monitor for my main workspace. Also if you are doing something that requires copying and pasting from separate windows, you can put one in each monitor and you don’t need to swap programs every time. A third monitor may help for some people, but I find it over stimulating, and often get confused on how to keep three monitors organized. Two is my recommendation. Also, I highly recommend you throw down the extra money for Ultramon or another program that allows you to have multiple task-bars.

Setting it up:
Your current video card may not be able to handle multiple monitors, and if you want a decent low cost replacement here’s my recommendations. All of these can be found on ebay for fairly cheap.
For AGP – ATI Radeon 9000 128Mb
For Standard PCI -ATI Radeon 7000, or 9000 64Mb (If you only have a PCI video card slot, this card should be more than sufficient for your system). ~$35
For PCI Express (x16) – ATI Radeon (x300 – x800) 256Mb (Dual monitor versions). These are low cost, very good performing cards. ~$30 – $100

If you’re computer supports SLI, crossfire or some other newer video technology, then you probably don’t need my advice on a Video card. There are a ton of good cards out there, these are all ones that i have used and would recommend. Also, if you come across a low cost one, almost any Matrox dual head card (>32Mb) will be very good.

Guide to setting up multiple computer monitors.

The second part of optimizing your monitor situation, is getting bigger monitors. I recommend 19″ (standard aspect) or 22″ (wide-screen aspect) or larger LCD monitors. Good LCD monitors are getting very close to the quality of a high-end CRT’s, and unless you do graphic design where screen colors have to be 100% precise, you wont know the difference. LCD’s are also getting much cheaper, and you can get a lot of very clear information on a 19″ screen, with minimal desk space. Right now, I recommend the Samsung 226BW 22″ Wide-screen LCD, and an adjustable stand. This monitor has the lowest refresh rate of anything I have ever seen, is huge, and costs about $300. By far the best monitor I have ever purchased. The only complaint is the crappy stand that comes stock, but it has VESA mounts that work with other stands.

3.) Make a daily schedule, and stick to it:
Make a schedule for your work just like you would at a normal job. Include periodic breaks, and a lunch break, and make a solid attempt to follow it. If it doesn’t work out at first, then adjust as necessary, but try to keep a consistent schedule.

Also include time-specific tasks that you need to perform throughout the day. (IE: 7AM write blog post, 3PM send daily orders to drop-shipper, or start packaging daily orders, etc.)

At times you may not think that you are getting as much done, but over time you can accomplish a greater amount because you are only working on one task at a time (see below), and that task was scheduled.

4.) Work on one task at a time:
While you may think you get more done when you are working on five things at once, multi-tasking actually reduces productivity. When you constantly switch between tasks, you experience a downtime getting back into the new task. This downtime and inability to get in a productive flow reduces your overall efficiency. Try to include in your schedule time for certain tasks that you know you have to do every day. (Updating websites, Programming New Features, Monitoring Advertising Campaigns, Etc.)

Additionally, If you constantly check and send emails, schedule to do this at the end or beginning of every hour or half hour. This way you aren’t interrupted answering emails every few minutes, but you can still get to them in a timely manner.

Projects that are going to take a lot of time, should be broken up over multiple days, or scheduled into your plan so that you can work on a single task for an entire day or more. This way you aren’t neglecting your other tasks, because you planned around the larger one.

You don’t necessarily need to be militarily strict with a schedule, but a little structure can go a long way.

5.) Outsource if you can’t do something (properly) yourself:
Sometimes you run into a task that is far beyond your current skill. It can be worth it to learn new skills to complete a project, but often it is much more effective to outsource to another professional. This is especially important if you don’t think you will use the new skill again or if it is something that will take a lot of time and / or money with little guarantee of future use.

Another reason to outsource is when you find that some service or continuous task that your business requires is taking more time and resources than you can comfortably give to it. Some examples are ongoing marketing campaigns, link building, certain website management tasks, etc. Outsourcing also may be necessary if you just aren’t getting the results that you think you should be getting. No everyone can be good at everything, and sometimes all you need is to see what does work to get you on the right path.

Try: http://www.getafreelancer.com to outsource a project.

Website Productivity

1.) Make very good use of FAQ and self help pages:
First off, I am not stating that you should make it difficult for your customers to contact you. Most website visitors would rather easily find the answer to their question on your website than call or email you. Being easy to contact does not negatively affect your visitor’s likelihood of making a purchase from you, it’s the exact opposite.

Your FAQ page(s) assuming that you have them (you should), should be based on the common questions that your customers ask, not just the questions that you think they will ask. If you are getting a lot of similar questions by email, start including those with universal answers on your FAQ page. FAQ pages should be very easy to find, and linked from appropriate areas of your site as well as from every page prominently in the navigation.

I have personally seen a website’s email volume get cut in half, while doubling their conversion rate just by optimizing their FAQ pages. A large percentage of visitors would rather shop somwhere else than try to contact you, so if you can answer their simple questions online, you just gained a few customers without any extra effort.

Universal FAQ answers:

• Shipping cost and delivery time
• Payment methods that are accepted
• Return and refund policy
• Product warranties
• Specific answers about your products
• Anything that more than two customers have asked you

2.) Properly integrate and automate payment methods on your website:
First off, I’m a very strong believer in multiple payment options for your visitors. I recommend accepting at a very minimum Paypal, and credit cards (not through paypal). If you are in the US, Google Checkout is gaining a fairly strong user base, and I as well as many other websites have seen Google Checkout transactions pass paypal transactions.

In all, Paypal accounts for about 10% of online transactions, and especially if your products are bought by tech savvy, or users who spend a lot of time online, paypal can make up a large percentage of your transactions.

Online shoppers will expect to be able to pay with a credit card at a minimum, and if you can offer other payment methods that some customers prefer, they will be more likely to come back and shop with you.

Properly integrating means that all of your payments are consolidated into a single back-end system. All of your orders, whether they are compiled daily or continuously, should be accessible from the same place. You shouldn’t need to log into paypal to get paypal orders, authorize.net for your credit card orders, google checkout for your google checkout orders, and so on. Everything should be designed into a single system. Having to go to multiple places to build order summaries, do customer service, and make reports takes a lot of unnecessary time. If you don’t have the technically ability to properly integrate the back-ends of different systems into yours, then hire a professional to do it for you.

3.) Make sure you are using a good website host:
Simple, if your website goes down, you don’t get business. If your website is slow because of your server has 15,000 other websites on it, you loose business. At any time someone could be trying to purchase something from you, so any interruption or poor performance can affect your business.

Once you get a reasonable amount of traffic, or you need to do some custom server configuring, or you expect that your online sales are going to grow a lot, it is probably time for a dedicated server. If you are able to manage servers yourself, there are un-managed dedicated servers for around $200 per month. For fully managed you should be looking in the $400 minimum per month range for a good quality service. Prices on dedicated servers have no limit, as you can easily shell out $5,000 per month on a small redundant server cluster. Most website owners will have a more stable, completely customizable and faster setup with a $200 per month dedicated server at a good host, than the best shared setup.

4.) Optimize advertising landing pages:
If the money you spend on advertising isn’t being used effectively, then you are just wasting business. Even if you are getting a positive ROI from your advertising, sometimes a few mistakes are keeping your from doubling or tripling your conversions. Landing pages tend to be one of the largest pitfalls of online advertisers, especially when they are made without a lot of usability and marketing experience.

There are companies that specialize in optimizing landing pages and advertising campaigns, and there are many blogs and websites that provide great information on getting the most out of your online advertising. Make sure that you are testing your landing pages, and give a new landing page some time before canning it or promoting it because diverse fluctuations are common with online advertising.

Checkout grokdotcom’s landing page optimization category, and http://www.marketingexperiments.com/.

5.) Optimize your website’s structure and navigation:
Again, if your visitors are getting confused or lost trying to get around your site, you are loosing business. If your pages are slow to load, or you have media that many visitors can’t view you are loosing more business. Continuously work on making your website easier to navigate, optimizing your product and shopping cart pages will really pay-off over time.

The Jakob Neilsen books in the books you must read section are a good place to start. There are hundreds of good usability resources on the internet, but I have found that the Jakob Neilsen books are the best place to start.

Useit.com and Grokdotcom are essential websites for website optimization.

Related Posts:
My favorite time-saving programs and hardware
10 Ways to ruin visitor experience on your website

Also, check out How To Improve Productivity from http://howtosplitanatom.com.