Web Design Tips: The Laws of Ecommerce Navigation Design

CSS, Flash, jQuery, and an arsenal of other powerful web techniques and technologies have unbound website design, creating the opportunity to develop either exceptional user interfaces or really frustrating ones.

Furthermore, the growth of "cookie-cutter" ecommerce templates (i.e., “insert your logo here”) has quelled site concepts with great potential and made some ecommerce pages as bland and tasteless as a papier-mâché popsicle.

To avoid the pitfalls of a site design that is too confusing, too ugly, or too experimental to be effective, the ecommerce site owner must strike a balance between leading-edge techniques and technologies, effectiveness, and aesthetics. So, in this edition of "Web Design Tips," I'll outline the laws for ecommerce site navigation design to help any ecommerce business.

Shoppers browsing to an ecommerce store don't want to be baffled by navigation. As I implied above, there are a lot of amazing things that you can do with site navigation that you shouldn't.

As a specific example, the agency Publicis & Hal Riney has developed site navigation that responds to gestures captured via web cam. The effect is stunning, and is an excellent way to demonstrate development talent. But as navigation, it is really frustrating. And if an ecommerce site deployed anything like it, I'd bet that they would never make a sale again.

Read More Article...