Creating content for your E-commerce Store is one of the more important tasks in your everyday management of an E-commerce Store.
Content is the juice the all-important search engines drinks, and you need to constantly feed them with delicious new juice.
But more importantly, you have a business that sells stuff. And your business needs customers to buy from you. In order to buy from you, customers want to check out your stuff, gain knowledge of “how this thing works”, how do I use it and so on.
What I’m trying to say is, don’t write content for search engines – write for humans – your customers! And the search engines will pick up.
E-commerce Website Templates
Before you start to create the content it self, whether it being content on product pages, category pages or information pages, you need a set of Website Templates in place for you to use.
When you want to create a new page, you should have a set of templates that varies in details e.g. the number of columns, content of the sidebar, different navigation menus, no navigation menus at all. You need a template to each use case. If your page is marketing related, a Facebook Page box, a Twitter stream or something could make sense, but if the page is your terms and conditions you might be better off with a plain and simple one column layout, without the social streams, newsletters and such.
The following is an overview of common layouts your templates could have.
From the Web Style Guide, chapter 6: Page Templates
Different use cases requires different templates. A landing page for an E-mail campaign might perform better if you go for a simple one-column template without all the navigation menus to remove clutter and focus on the message you’re trying to get across with the campaign.
Your product pages is different, here it makes sense to list the categories in a sidebar to help the user navigate other categories and find what they need.
In your checkout flow, the context of the user is no longer to find more products, but to actually buy those that they’ve already found. Then the categories list in the sidebar should be removed, you might get rid of the sidebar entirely – but you need to focus on getting the sale done.
Template Frameworks to the rescue
Your E-commerce platform must have a template framework in place, to make it easy for you to switch back and forth between layouts. You should be able to set the layout (One, Two, Three columns) on any template, and your should be able to set a template for any given page – whether that being product pages, category pages or information (content) pages.
A set of templates also makes it easier for you to cooperate with a designer. Your designer can create the templates you need, using the different layouts – and it is just a matter for you to use them. If you want changes to some of the templates, you simply get the designer to work and make them as you want. All pages using the updated templates, automatically gets the updated design.
Nice new info. thanks for keeping us up to date