If you're building a new site or redesigning an existing one, chances are good that you'll be researching and interviewing web designers to create the right front-end design experience for your site. But good websites don't come cheap. How can you make sure you're not wasting your money? How can you choose the right e-commerce designer?

I love making buttons. They're fun, there's a huge variety, and they make an incredible difference to a site. The size, color, shape, and style of your buttons can trigger a difference the conversion rate of an e-commerce site. Buttons that stand out from the rest of the site's designs are essential - if they blend in and match too closely, users overlook them.

Niche stores that focus on a small range of products have a luxury of often being able to limit their top-level categories to a few choices. An old rule of thumb was to aim for seven choices in any navigation menu, based on Miller's Law, which states that the human mind can only remember 7 (plus or minus 2) items in a list.

Once you've gotten a shopper to add a product or two to their cart, you have a reasonable chance of converting them into a buyer. The process of moving them from the cart or basket page through the checkout steps to the final receipt page is known as the checkout process. There are a number of usability best practices for checkout screens. We recently performed a cleanup of the checkout screens for one of our clients that followed these guidelines, and I want to present some of these ideas with screenshots from the redesign. Read on to find out what we did and the results we've seen.

If you've read this blog for awhile, ever talked to me, know what I do for a living, or have anything else to do with me in any other way, you probably know that I eat, sleep, and breathe e-commerce...and that my usual platform of choice is Miva Merchant. I've used other systems on occasion, for fun and for work, to various degrees, but Miva is where I started and where I spend most of my time.