If you have a website of any kind, then you probably use it to either sell or promote some of your products. One of your main concerns as a webmaster would be how to make the user experience more enjoyable for your website visitors. Also, you are probably looking for ways that you can use to improve your overall search engine ranking for the keywords that your website is targeting. Both of these things can be achieved by allowing user interaction with your website. This is not something unique or radical, in fact many of the world’s biggest websites such as Amazon and eBay follow these tips, so learn from the successful guys and implement them.

• Allow User Ratings on Your Items

If you sell merchandise, allowing your users to give a rating, usually in terms of stars, can be a very good way to have them interact with your website and give feedback on products and services that you have and that they have used. Unless you deliberately sell junk and don’t really want your customers to come back to your site (well… they might kind of complain and this annoys scammers, you know), then there should be no problem with letting your site visitors rate your products.

• Allow Comments, Reviews and Testimonials From Users and Encourage them to Participate

This is good for SEO, as it creates unique content which is user generated, so you didn’t really need to take any action in order to put it there anyways. So it saves a lot of effort for you. Are you selling some products? Let buyers post some reviews of them. Many big name shopping sites do that, such as Amazon. Did you post a news article, blog post or made a YouTube video for your website visitors? Let them comment about it and encourage them to leave feedback, by using a call to action such as “What Do You Think of This New Service? Let Us Know Below!”. Monitor your comments to delete spam and obvious trolling or stupidity, but also keep an eye out for visitors that have a question or concern. You can then either respond to them in the comments, or ask them to communicate with you in a private way such as by email or by sending a message through your website.

• Include Social Media Buttons

This really isn’t complicated at all. All you need to do is include buttons for social media, such as your Twitter and Facebook profiles, or your YouTube channel. You can incorporate these to your website very easily and many large companies and even government agencies now have them on their sites due to the prevalent use of social networking sites. You also don’t have to use the icons provided by the social networking sites, instead you can use custom ones that would better match the layout of your website. Of course, you could always download the trial edition of Photoshop and design the logos yourself too. Social media buttons will allow your visitors to get social with you on various networks that your business participates in.

If you are going to design your online shop website, or any other kind of business website yourself, then there are a few important tips that you need to keep in mind. These will help you give your users a better browsing experience when they look at your site and it will also be helpful for SEO in certain cases.

• Use the right color scheme

There is a variety of backgrounds and templates that you can use for your website. Some are simple solid colors, while others feature intricate and creative design elements. The most important thing here is that the text of your website is clearly visible to your users. So if your website background is black, then you will need to make your text a bright color, such as white or gold, to stand out.

• Avoid using pre-fabricated templates

There are hundreds of free website templates that you can find online and use for your website. This is great, however you should know that if you were able to download that template for free and use it on your site, then so did hundreds of others webmasters on the internet. Therefore, there will probably be many sites that look just like yours. Don’t be afraid to modify the design to make it look more unique. You can easily do this with a graphics manipulation program such as Photoshop or GIMP. This would allow you to customize things like backgrounds, headers, buttons, etc. You can also pay for a custom template to be designed for you, however this can cost between $25 and $1000 depending on what you want done and how complex it is.

• Check to make sure your site works with all browsers

Test out your website in all browser, like Internet Explorer, Firefox and Chrome to make sure that it works well and all elements appear correctly. This will provide a better user experience for your visitors. Also, it is a good idea to create a mobile version of your site as well. Since there is an increasing amount of visitors that use smart phones like the iPhone or Android phones to shop online, this can be very useful. There are many free tools and tutorials that are available online to webmasters which would allow you to accomplish this.

• Test all elements of your site before deploying it

This is an important part. Once you are done designing your website, make sure that everything works well and is bug free. Check to make sure that all your links work, for example. There are automated tools that can let you easily do that and can save you a lot of problems, as it often happens that a typo could make a link not working or an image not displaying correctly. Also, check your payment gateway to be sure that it sends your customers to the checkout page correctly and that the prices, minus any discount offers or promotions, are reflected in the right way on your site. Many payment gateways have a “Sandbox” mode for testing purposes.

The biggest growing segment on the internet for traffic is mobile web browsers. Every smartphone (minus BlackBerry until BB 6.0, at least) has a very capable web browser able to display rich content just like you are used to on your computer.

The problem is, it isn’t always fluid. What does that mean? When you are viewing your website on the web browser, and you have an iPhone or Android phone (without Flash) your header image might not be there because it was Adobe Flash based instead of HTML. That ruins the experience for the viewer, and with more and more people that will be viewing your website on their phone you need to do something about it.

First thing first, no Flash. I don’t care if Android just announced they would be getting Flash today, you are still segmenting a huge piece of the market if you continue to use Flash on your website. It simply isn’t worth the hassle.

Another thing to be conscience of is your navigation. I have a Motorola Milestone and it doesn’t have the best touch screen (actually, it is horrendous). The inability to click on tiny links is very frustrating to me and ruins my experience (and wastes my time) on may of my favorite sites.

By making navigation bigger and easier to select (and not select the wrong one) you will improve your user experience both on computer and mobile browsers. Drop down menus are a great example, Android phones can click the first link fine, but any links in the drop down menu can be easily mis-clicked while on a mobile device, breaking the experience.

You can have a great website for a computer, but make sure you also consider the mobile device. Having your designer code for the mobile version as well is really important. Keep the mobile market in mind when doing anything, or have a complete mobile version. WordPress and many other platforms have great mobile plugins that allow you to easily transform your design into a mobile version, or create your own.