The dpivision.com Ltd weblog

Web design boffin Andy Clarke is dishing out his top tips at a special masterclass next month.

Andy Clarke has teamed up with special guest Brendan Dawes for a full day of learning on how to create masterful designs for the web.

The class will not only teach you how to brush up your skills, it will also inspire new designs, improve layouts with grid-based techniques, improve readability by using better typography and most importantly how to make your website stand out from all the others.

The Visual Web design Masterclass takes place on December 1 at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design, London and costs £395, incl VAT.

Andy, a pioneer in web accessibility, is also holding a series of classes throughout next year. To book a place on any of them, or to find out more, log onto http://forabeautifulweb.com/.

The team at Dpivision.com has been sharing their top tips on how to successfully sell online.

In a series of articles published on www.webretailer.com, we give a step-to-step starter guide to help online sellers get set up.

We are dishing out details on how to choose a payment provider and the best way to accept payments online, including options for taking card payments and how to unearth the best deal.

Deciding what e-commerce platform to choose can also be hard in a market that’s saturated with products.

In this article, we look at what you need from an e-commerce platform, and how to select a suitable package and web host.

In the third piece, we give hot tips on choosing a domain name and the importance of getting it right so your business is branded correctly.

To take a look at the articles we wrote below:

Starting Out
http://www.webretailer.com/articles/

Choosing a payment provider
http://www.webretailer.com/articles/choosing-a-payment-provider.asp

Choosing an e-commerce platform
http://www.webretailer.com/articles/choosing-an-ecommerce-platform.asp

Choosing a domain name
http://www.webretailer.com/articles/choosing-a-domain-name.asp

We live in a strange world. A world where people are currently in fear at the possibility of the world ending any time now (with the turn on of Earth’s largest Science experient to date, the Large Hadron Collider) it appears this is over-shadowed by what seems a more important argument: the new Facebook.

For the past couple of months now, Facebook has slowly been rolling out a re-design of it’s web site. However, this has caused uproar and people in their thousands have began rebelling, forming groups on Facebook petitioning against the new design, and even threatening to leave the web site altogether in favour of rivals such as MySpace and Bebo.

It’s a fickle place we live in. The Large Hadron Collider was in the news for about a day and interest soon wained when no black hole appeared as a result of the machine being turned on. The Facebook debate, however, has been in the news since before interest in the LHC peaked and has remained in the news since.

At the end of the day, Facebook will have spent a lot of money on this complete overhaul of the site. They’re not going to drop it just because a group of users have banded together and threatened to boycott the site if they’re not re-attached to their familiar old and outdated profiles. But I can garuantee: Facebook would lose more money not rolling out their redesign than if a few thousand people left the site in “disgust”. Facebook has 100 millions users. It’s akin to Bill Gates losing $1,000 on a walk to the shops: nothing.

So what are your views on the new Facebook design if you’re a part of the website? Do you like it? Dislike it? Why not let us know your views. But for now, this author is all for the new look Facebook.

An insight into the mind of online shoppers has been revealed in a recent survey.

The Pew foundation quizzed thousands of online shoppers to find out why they shop online, and they found the top four reasons are:

- Shopping online is convenient (78%)
- Best place to buy items that are hard to find (77%)
- Shopping online saves time (68%)
- Best place to find bargains (49%)

The study showed that online shoppers’ attitudes haven’t changed a bit since 1999, when the last survey took place, despite the Internet growing by 3,042%.

Internet security was also highlighted as a growing concern, with 75% admitting they don’t like giving their credit card number or personal details online.

But those questioned said they don’t mind leaving details once they are satisfied the site is credible so make sure your shop lives up to the test to keep customers coming back.

One in four web merchants do not know web shopping laws - Most internet shoppers do not know about their right to cancel and 28% of UK-based online traders are not aware or only slightly aware of the laws applying to internet shopping, according to a report published by the Office of Fair Trading (OFT) recently.

“While 56% of internet shoppers surveyed did not know about their right to cancel under the Distance Selling Regulations, 29% did not know where to turn to get advice on their rights.”

Fact!

The UK internet shopping market is estimated to be worth over £21.4bn, and last year over 20 million people shopped online with nearly a third of them spending over £1,000, according to the OFT.