Simplicity and consistency
Users are not impressed with complexity that seems gratuitous, especially users who may be depending on your site for timely and accurate work-related information. Your interface metaphors should be simple, familiar and logical to the audience if you want a metaphor for information design, choose a book or a library, not a spacecraft or a television set. The best information designs are the ones most users never notice.
Studio Archetype's work for the Adobe Corporation site is an excellent model of Web site design. The pages use graphics extensively as navigation aids, consistently applied across every one of the pages in the site. Once you know where the standard links are on the page header graphics, the interface becomes almost invisible and navigation is easy.

shopping cart

Definition

Software used to make a site's product catalogue available for online ordering, whereby visitors may select, view, add/delete, and purchase merchandise.

Information

Shopping carts are available as standalone software or as part of hosted storefronts. Companies with special needs may prefer standalone software that can be integrated with their other systems. Companies with simple needs may prefer one-size-fits-all hosted storefronts.

On a Web site that sells products or services online, the shopping cart is a common metaphor (from the original grocery store shopping cart) for the catalog or other pages where a user reads and makes selections. Typically, the user checks off any products or services that are being ordered and then, when finished ordering, indicates that and proceeds to a page where the total order is placed and confirmed. The programming that provides a Web site with the ability to build a catalog and its associated database and to integrate pages into its site that provide users the ability to shop is known as shopping cart software.

A primary consideration when choosing shopping cart software is whether it will continue to serve a Web site's needs as its catalog and volume of orders grow.