Most Attractive E-commerce Website Designs

The best way to build an attractive e-commerce website for your online business is by taking inspiration from some of the best e-commerce website designs.

Qualities of a good e-commerce website
An attractive e-commerce website must meet the following qualities

1. Love
2. Trust
3. Purpose

Beauty of whatever kind, in its supreme development, invariably excites the sensitive soul to tears. Edgar Allan Poe

A first time visitor to your e-commerce website must see you sell what he/she wants, he/she must love being there and he must feel he can trust buying from you. All this must happen in an instant or else the visitor will close your homepage and go elsewhere.

The following are some of the best e-commerce website designs that meet my criteria of attractiveness (Love, Trust and Purpose)

1. Amazon.com
Amazon.com is the king of e-commerce. Amazon has annual revenues of $50 billion and all that is sold via their website.

To do those kind of sales they must be doing something right. Trust comes easy for this website because Amazon.com is a well known brand and everyone knows them. You can build trust for your e-commerce website by promoting your online store through media mentions and advertising.

The design allows visitors to search products in terms of categories, price, age, color, delivery etc.

2. Reeds.com

You know what reeds.com sell the minute you open their homepage. Make sure your e-commerce website homepage has large size images of your products. The homepage is the first page a new visitor clicks on and first impressions matter.

On the homepage include sweeteners such as special offers, discounts and free shipping to encourage visitors to buy.

3. Apple Store
Make it easy and quick.

Apple is known for well designed products. The Iphone, Ipod and Ipad are not just well designed but they are easy to use. And that spirit is showcased on Apple online store.

The menu at the top is designed to help a visitor go straight to the product he is interested in.

Make it easy for buyers to find what they are looking for.

4. Petflow.com
If you are selling hundreds of products you should go with a design similar to petflow.com.

They sell hundreds of pet brands and they have a list of all the available brands at the bottom of the homepage. If you want a particular brand you just click on the name and you go straight to the product.

It is a nice way of solving the problem of how to promote hundreds of products.

Best Websites To Download Royalty Free Photos

Blogs or websites that use photos are more captivating than sites that just use plain text. When a visitor lands on a web page with a combination of text and images he is more likely to read more and stick on the page for long time. That is why it is very important to incorporate photos in your posts.

Photos can be purchased from stock photo services such as shutterstock and istockphoto. Most people download photos from Google images assuming they are free but that is not the case, the images belong to someone else. If you’ve downloaded a photo or other image from another website into your own and you did not obtain permission from the owner, you could be held liable.

Websites To Download Royalty Free Photos.

The following websites provide a catalog of photos. You can download the photos for free and use them in your website. Some have conditions such as, require registration or demand you link back to the source of the image. Beware on the terms of use before you go, copy and paste.

Free Digital Photos
Freedigitalphotos.net has deep range of photos. The condition is you link back to the portfolio of the owner and reference the image source (the owner and the website itself). You can buy the images at a price of $3 and up if you don’t want to give credit.

Iconspedia

IconsPedia has a variety of icons and provides the licensing up front – private use, commercial OK, creative commons, etc.

In terms of use, some require a link and reference to the source, some are just free for personal use.

Public Domain Images
They have free high quality photos. Public domain images are explicitly placed in the public domain. You can use all public domain images from this gallery for whatever you want, use it freely for personal and commercial use. No back link is required.

Zemanta
It is not a site but a wordpress photo plugin that gives users of wordpress the ability to upload free photos while they write their blog post. It analyzes your text to provide relevant photos and tells their licensing information up front. When an image is clicked, it’s added automatically with a caption referencing the source.

Do you have any other sites you’d like to share that offer free images licensed under GNU, creative commons, or are public domain? Suggestions are most welcome!