Small Business Ecommerce Link Digest – April 18, 2008

Happy Friday, everyone. The thinks cafe is serving more Friday link juice. This week’s flavor: Reasons for redesigning your website. Drink hearty.

• Clearly, I’m a big fan of Zappos. CNet looks at how Zappos is planning their redesign around introducing new product categories. But instead of launching the new categories and the new site in one big push, the company is testing “…a soft launch of the new, cleaner look to around 1,000 customers before deciding on a formal rollout plan.” Very smart.
• Another reason for redesigning your site is to improve your search engine rankings through search engine optimization. Over on Search Engine Land there’s a strong argument showing why SEO is not free. Building those efforts into a redesign often allows you to kill the proverbial two birds.
• Oftentimes, you’ll redesign and move your site to a new domain at the same time. SEO Roundtable highlights Google’s recent announcement of best practices for moving your site. Long overdue and well worth bookmarking.
• Finally, redesigning never makes sense if it doesn’t give customers what they want. The always link-worthy Linda Bustos lists common things customers really want from your site.

Catch you all right back here on Monday. Cheers!