Bid draft - 2

Navigation
It is very important that users know where they are on the site and how to get back if they have arrived at the wrong page. To ensure that users can clearly navigate the site we will have:-

1. The Smalltown logo at the top left corner will be a home link.
2. A horizontal tabbed navigation for the main parts of the website. This worked successfully for both Blackwell and Amazon websites.
3. Book genre types will be listed as a vertical menu down the left hand site with the page clicked indicated with an arrow.

The navigational elements will be controlled using cascading style sheets (C.S.S.)

Colour
Multi-coloured book covers are best displayed as Amazon and Blackwell have done on a neutral white background and we will do the same for the main content area.
Starting with the most important part of the website which is the cookery section, in the same way that Blackwell uses blues to look academic we will use for the areas surrounding the main content to reflect cookery which are rustic browns, and reds.
(See http://www.bbc.co.uk/victorianchristmas/ and http://www.booksforcooks.com )
When the users navigate away from the cookery section these rustic borders will disappear and the user will know that they are now in the general books area.
Like Amazon’s blue and orange navigation colours we will use complementary colours to the cookery section colours.
Exact colours are to be decided but we will use a professional looking colour scheme using Adobe Kular for suggested colours and will be controlled using CSS.

Layout
Mixture of fixed column for the left hand side and liquid for main content so that it show more information to users with bigger screens.

Functionality
We will do our best to ensure we follow best practice in writing W3C valid XHTML code, adhere to WCAG and make sure the content is easily crawled by web spiders and robots so that it ranks highly with search engines so you sell more books.
With e-commerce it’s essential that users becomes customers with the fewest amount of clicks and we will ensure that your customers can get shopping within 3 mouse clicks.
We will monitor user input by using Javascript.
We hope to use Cookies will monitor users searches and make suitable recommendations just like Amazon.

Social Media
We recommend 2 social media feeds to appear on the site to help with it’s SEO.
A Blog where staff and customers can review and comment on the latest books. And will use AJAX to display excepts of those reviews on the right hand column of the sites pages just like Amazon.
A Twitter account that customers can join so that they can be informed of latest offers and arrivals. This will ensure that your customers have reasons to keep returning to your online bookstore.

Administration
Database control with be password protected and secure. We will provide the facility to monitor the increase in sales that this new website will no doubt generate.