PHP and MySQL Web Development 4th Ed-tqw-_darksiderg

Considering the Types of Commercial Websites
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Trust
If a visitor is not familiar with your brand name, why should he trust you? Anybody can
put together a website. People do not need to trust you to read your brochureware site,
but placing an order requires a certain amount of faith. How is a visitor to know
whether you are a reputable organization or the aforementioned dog?
People are concerned about a number of issues when shopping online:
n What are you going to do with their personal information? Are you going
to sell it to others, use it to send them huge amounts of advertising, or store it
somewhere insecurely so that others can gain access to it? Telling people what you
will and will not do with their data is important. Such information is called a privacy
policy and should be easily accessible on your site.
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Are you a reputable business? If your business is registered with the relevant
authority in a particular place; has a physical office, warehouse, and a phone number;
and has been in business for a number of years, it is less likely to be a scam
than a business that consists solely of a website and perhaps a post office box. Make
sure that you display these details.
What happens if a purchaser is not satisfied with a purchase? Under what
circumstances will you give a refund? Who pays for shipping? Mail order retailers
have traditionally had more liberal refund and return policies than traditional
shops. Many offer an unconditional satisfaction guarantee. Consider the cost of
returns against the increase in sales that a liberal return policy will create.Whatever
your policy is, make sure that it is displayed on your site.
Should customers entrust their credit card information to you? The single
greatest trust issue for Internet shoppers is fear of transmitting their credit card
details over the Internet. For this reason, you need to both handle credit cards
securely and be seen as security conscious. At the very least, this means using
Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) to transmit the details from the users’ browser to your
web server and ensuring that your web server is competently and securely administered.
We discuss this topic in more detail later.
Ease of Use
Consumers vary greatly in their computer experience, language, general literacy, memory,
and vision.Therefore, your site needs to be as easy as possible to use. Usability and user
interface design principles fill many books on their own, but here are a few guidelines:
n Keep your site as simple as possible. The more options, advertisements, and
distractions on each screen, the more likely a user is to get confused.