Give Your E-Commerce Web Site An Extreme Makeover

[mandy]

If your Web site has a 2001 style, it's time for a new look. Here's what five companies are doing to improve their sites.

Clunky search engines, cluttered home pages, a lack of helpful customer tools, apologetic messages about sites being "temporarily unavailable." Take your pick. It's been more than seven years since E-commerce emerged as a significant business strategy, yet many Web sites remain difficult to use and still don't produce the hoped-for revenue.

Here's a look at five Web sites--Staples.com, Budget.com, Newegg.com, Delta.com, and AETV.com--and how they went about their Web-site makeovers. The state of their sites, which range from the transformed to the still in disrepair, should inject any inert E-commerce organization with a healthy combination of motivation and fear.

full article: http://www.informationweek.com/story/sho...=174400119

[valleygirl]

of the top 5 website mistakes listed #3 drives me bonkers and #1 makes me hit the back button

1. Poor legibility
Frustrations with font sizes, text-versus-background contrast, and general text readability were by far the biggest pet peeves among users.


3. Flash misuse
This isn't a problem with Macromedia Flash itself, but rather how it's used. When it's applied to lend interactivity to a static page, it works. When it's used to power multimedia content that's either pertinent to the site experience or offered only as a user-controlled option, it's helping. But when it's the basis of an unsolicited introduction to a site, or presents content that's irrelevant to the user's task, it gets in the way of a good experience.