Accessibility and Ease of use i.e simple navigation and an option to increase font or contrast of the page for visitors with a visual impairment. The website must abide specific legislation’s such as Data Protection Act and Sales of Goods Act. It must include a privacy policy and terms and conditions page for customers, to tell them how their information is stored and the terminology of the website. A Good design that is focused on the target audience. Search engine optimisation for marketing the site through the main search engines i.e. Google, Yahoo, Msn, Alexa and Ask.

Technologies Required

Not only do we have to make the shopping site effective for the customers but, we must provide an easy way to update stock and product information. Most designers use the coding language HTML, (Hyper Text Markup Language) which is static which is not ideal for shop owners to update the site. Basically, you have two factors on a web page, static and dynamic. Dynamic sites links the web pages with a database that allows ease of use when updating the site. If we used a static web site we would have to update every page which links into the one we are making amendments to and this would take too much time.

The coding language PHP (Pre Hypertext Processor) is frequently used for dynamic web pages. It works on variables which allow the database to make the changes for us. So when we need to make a change to a product listed we log into the back end of the site and make the changes necessary and save, it will then find every page the product is listed under and make changes to them almost instantly.

Does your website convert traffic?

To develop an e-commerce shopping site we must first take into consideration on who our audience or main target market is going to be. There’s no use on trying to sell a product to a market as a whole when you’re least likely to find the right potential customers that will make a purchase.

An effective web site’s main aim is to encourage the target market to make a purchase, this is called a Conversion Rate or Click Through Rate. Firstly, to achieve a good conversion rate we must design the site appropriately using Macromedia Dreamweaver and Adobe Photoshop to fit with the “ethos” of our audience. If a website is unclear what it is selling or causes any confusion it is more than likely that the visitor will leave your page.

Marketing is about persuading potential customers to do business with you, by creating a brand image that reflects the kind of company you are and the kinds of products and services you sell. Marketing involves communicating all the benefits why customers should choose to do business with you instead of your competitors and delivering all that is promised in the way of performance and service. It is important that you do not set too high expectations because you may then end up with a larger work load than you can handle. - Turner (2006)

The societal marketing concept holds that the organisation’s task is to determine the needs, wants, and interests of target markets and to deliver the desired satisfactions more effectively and efficiently than competitors, in a way that preserves or enhances the consumer’s and the society’s well-being. - Kotler, Philip. (1994) 
 

Marketing strategies are developed individually for different business types. For example, a voluntary sector organisation such as a charity would implement marketing by using shock tactics or “emotional blackmail” by showing horrific and realistic imagery to persuade us to donate to a desperate cause.

A contrast to the above marketing strategy would be carried out by a private sector organisation such as Tesco. One reason for this is because of their competition, if they fail to distinguish the benefits of visiting their supermarket compared to their competitors, then their customers will choose to shop elsewhere. Tesco often advertise their best products and special offers in a price comparison to show that they provide better products and services than their competition.

The DVLA, a public sector and non profit organisation, would alternatively use factual information to inform people when to update their details on their driving license or vehicle registration. Their marketing tactics are seen as a “necessity” rather than an option.

The marketing mix consists of the combination of the four P’s:

Product, Place, Price and Promotion
 

Product Strategies

When an organisation introduces a new product into a market they must ask themselves a number of questions.

• 1. Who is the product aimed at?
  2. What benefit will they expect?
  3. How do they plan to position the product within the market?
  4. What makes people demand the product over their competitors?
      

Place strategies

Refers to how an organisation will distribute their product or service they’re offering to the end user. The organisation must distribute the product to the user at the right place at the right time. If organisations underestimate demand and customers cannot purchase products efficiently then profitability will be affected.

There are two types of distribution in an organisation, direct and indirect distribution.
 

Direct Distribution

Manufacturer > Consumer

Indirect Distribution

Manufacturer > Wholesaler > Retailer > Consumer
 

Pricing Strategies

Pricing is one of the most important elements of the marketing mix, as it is the only sector, which generates a turnover for the organisation. The remaining 3p’s are the variable cost for the organisation.
 

Promotion Strategies

A good product or service will be useless if no one can see it. Promotion is about communicating the product or service clearly to the target market.
An organisations promotional strategy can consist of:

Blogging is based solely on your own effort, my theory is the more you put into blogging, the greater the outcome. A blog can be profitable, if you share your knowledge from any of your desired topics to inspire or help an audience. It’s an opportunity to build a strong community for the inexperienced and experts.

What I use to blog?

Download Wordpress for self hosted

The two most important things to creating a sucessful blog are search engine rankings and good content to produce a good user readership or “buzz”. If you write a website full of information that is solely for search engines then the readers will not be interested, so stay relevant at all times.

Find something you would enjoy writing about or something your have an expertise in. You’ll find creating a blog can be very daunting if you are writing about something that doesnt interest you. 

Finding the right keywords

The art behind finding the right keywords for your blog is to find the less competitive keywords (niche markets) that have a high cost per click. There is good software that can be found on the internet that provides a solution to what keywords people are searching for on the main search engines.

“Wordtracker helps website owners and search engine marketers identify keywords and phrases that are relevant to their or their client’s business and most likely to be used as queries by search engine visitors.”

 https://www.wordtracker.com/trial/

Once you have a list of 25 keywords or more you can then research your competitors for your chosen keywords. I will show you a free tool that can be used for the analysis of any websites pagerank, search engine rankings, internal and external links and the keyword density for their index page.

But first, please download and install mozilla firefox before we can use the following plugin.

http://www.mozilla.com/products/download.html?product=firefox-3.0.3&os=win&lang=en-US

This plugin is called Seoquake, a Mozilla Firefox extension aimed primarily at helping web masters who deal with search engine optimization and internet promotion of web sites. Make sure you open the downloaded file with Mozilla Firefox, once installed restart Mozilla Firefox. You should now see a toolbar displaying SEO statistical information about the web page you are currently on.

Now goto google and type your first researched keyword and look at the organic links listed. Visit all the websites in the first page for your keyword and collect data on page ranking, how many times that site is indexed, the internal and external links and the keyword density.

What we can gather from this information?

All the external links can be checked to see if we can link to them, which in return can give you lots of strong relevant links. External links are counted by search engines to give a page ranking and for how many times that page is indexed.

We can also stay ahead of the train by summarising their most frequent keywords they use with the keyword density tool in SEOQuake.

Marketing is a continual process of planning and implementation of the four P’s (Product, Place, Price and Promotion) for either a product or service, or providing an incentive for exchange between individuals and organisations.

Innocent is one of Britain’s best known companies. The company produces smoothies (pulped fruit drinks with no additives). It was set up by Adam Balon, Richard Reed, and Jon Wright. In 2006 it had a turnover of £70m.

Innocent Smoothies are free of concentrates and preservatives and are sold in eco-friendly bottles and supermarket tetrapaks. It is a company that has captured the public’s imagination - because it gives away ten per cent of its profits (to causes such as Rainforrest Alliance), has no chief executive, and constantly seeks to find out the views of customers.

Primary -
The primary business sector consists of small and large businesses involved in gathering raw materials or collection of any natural resources.
Industry examples: Farmers, Mining, Logging, Quarrying, Oil Refinery

Secondary-
Secondary is anything to do with processing, refining or manufacturing the gathered raw materials into a prouct.
Industry examples: Manufacturers, Wholesellers.

Tertiary-
This sector is anything involving retailers or professional services, the last sector in the chain before selling directly to consumers.
Industry examples: Supermarket, Insurance, Bank, Retailer

Business Purposes