Bid draft - 3

Following our client discussion we propose the following features for your Smalltown
e-commerce bookstore:-

E-Commerce usability
We recommend optimising conversion rates by building the structure around the principle of landing page to purchase in no more than 3 clicks. This is extremely important in e-commerce as each click is a point for confusion or drop out.

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 as a home link.
2. A horizontal tabbed navigation for the main part 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 side with the page clicked indicated with an arrow.

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

Colour
We recommend that multi-coloured book covers are best displayed on a neutral white background as Amazon and Blackwell demonstrate.
As the cookery section is key we propose using rustic browns and reds to reinforce the cookery theme as these cookery sites do.
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 to be replaced with complementary colours signposting to the user they are now in a general books area.
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
We propose building a mixture of fixed column for the left hand side and liquid for main content to cater for users with a range of screen sizes.

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. Plus we 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 will be password protected and secure. We will provide the facility to monitor the increase in sales that this new website will no doubt generate.

Quality Coding
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. We will monitor user input by using Javascript.
and Cookies will monitor users searches and make suitable recommendations just like Amazon.

These practises will ensure a success measured in high sales and an enjoyable user experience.