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Strategies Associated With New Media in E-commerce Introduction This paper will highlight the main points to take into consideration while designing a site for e-commerce. The Internet opens up a whole new dimension in trading and this service medium has the potential, if used correctly, to make life simpler and can be used as an effective communication tool. Nowadays you can do anything from the comfort of your own sofa. You can transfer stocks, then chat to friends in America while ordering pizza and tickets to your local theatre. But as businesses transfer to cyberspace there is a great deal of difference between the real world and of that on your Mac monitor. Website design has developed from on-screen brochures to a selection of complex worlds all contained within a site. Designers have learnt to harness the power of information architecture and navigation so that the final product is a more friendly and easy-to-use version for the customer. If customers arrive at a site, which either frustrates them or does not give them the information they require, then they are less than likely to return. In order to be customer-effective, we need, as designers, to address every second of their visit to the site. The layout should be simple, but should hold their concentration for as long as possible. The need to provide an organised site is helped by starting designing with paper-prototyping. Testing This, effectively, is a copy of each page of the site layout on paper. If the site works on paper there is little reason for it not to work on screen. Customers can find their way through the pages giving feedback at the end as to how easy or difficult it was to navigate through and what they might change. This kind of testing is essential, because as designers, we can get stuck in a rut and only see things as we would like to see them, not how a customer would see them. It is essential to understand that concepts and terminology need to be kept simple and ’real’ because the site needs to be understood by everyone visiting it, even the ‘accidental browser’. Imagine a very rich ‘Tim, Nice, but Dim’. If he does not understand the layout of the Ferrari website, he will leave disgruntled, and Ferrari has lost out on a potential sale.
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