When selling your products online, the design of your e-commerce website can greatly impact your online sales. The design of your e-store has gone from a convenience to a significant strategy element for businesses. It can help a business establish their identity, develop its brand, and make its products stand out from the competition. However, you need to tread carefully when designing your site. The wrong web design could cost you potential income and have an overall negative impact on your business. But, there is a silver lining to this cloud, following these tips will get you on to a better user experience and improved sales numbers.
Are You Mobile Friendly?
It’s 2015, a responsive, mobile friendly e-store is no longer a competitive advantage or customer convenience, it’s a necessity for doing business online. With ComScore releasing a recent report that mobile internet use has now surpassed desktop use, being mobile-friendly is needed to keep up with your competitors. This change from desktop to mobile shopping will impact B2C and B2B customers alike.
A Professional and Polished Logo
The logo is one of the most important parts of your brand. It’s the watermark that sticks in people’s memories when confronted with something you sell. Make sure it is clean and fits your brand image. When placing it on your site, make sure that it is a high-resolution image and it’s prominently featured. Usually this is done by placing it in the upper left hand corner of the site. Additionally, you’re going to want to link the image back to the home page so that customers can easily navigate to it.
Keep Pages Clean
It’s very easy these days for a customer to have a visual overload when they go to a website and they leave because of too much choice. To keep visitors on your site, make sure to not have competing calls to action or lots of visual clutter (i.e. images, videos, etc) that would draw the customer’s eyes away from what is important.
Don’t Be Afraid Of White Space
Controlling white space through design is a great way to keep uses focused on the content. Creating this space in-between your text and images gives some “breathing space” for customers to digest information before continuing on their journey. With visuals becoming more and more the focus of competition for user’s attention on the web, less is more. Controlling what you do with white space will help improve the user experience, and increase returns for your e-store.
Use Color To Stand Out
When using colors for your website, the rule of thumb is to use a mostly neutral color palette which will help you project an elegant and modern experience. Using small dashes of colors for headlines and key graphics can draw the user to the most important information. Additionally, make sure that the color that you do use complements your logo and is consistent with your other marketing materials.
Don’t Use Generic Photos Found On The Web
Today’s consumer is extremely savvy, and can sniff out generic stock photos quicker than you can say Getty. When visitors see generic photos on your site for your services or products, they’re pulled out of the experience, and will gain a generic impression of your company. Investing in professional photographs of your products or investing in professional stock photos can really make the difference. Good photographs will catch the eye and can invoke an emotional response to the written content.
Button, Button, Where’s The Button?
The submit button is usually considered the ugliest part of a website. To help change this you could do it a number of ways. Make the button interactive, when you hover or click it, have it change color. You can also change the text so that it doesn’t say ‘submit.’ No one wants to submit to anything, so take a different approach and change it to something fun or related to the product.
The Dinosaurs Called They Want Their Flash Plug-in Back
The days of Flash have come to a close. While it was a great innovator for rich media on websites, today, there are many more alternatives that are site and user-friendly. One of the most popular options is using HTML5. With search-engine friendly text and the ability to function on practically all mobile operating systems without a plug-in, it really is the way to go if you plan on having embedded videos or other rich media on your website.
Make Reading Easy On The Eyes
When choosing fonts for your website, keep in mind, most people are going to be on the site from a mobile device. Some large scale fonts, might read well on a computer screen, but when scaled down for the mobile screen, they lose the desired look and feel, and in the worst case scenario end up being unreadable. To get around this, it is recommended that you choose a universal font, and make sure to pick one that can be easily read at 11pts or less.
Don’t Forget To Test The Design
Finally, whenever you are changing around a current design, or planning on implementing a re-design, always make sure to test the changes. In actuality, all design decisions are really a hypothesis waiting to be tested. By using different testing methods such as A/B testing and user testing, your customers can help you improve your designs by providing feedback from real people on your different design experiments.
By using these tips, you can help bring your website to the fore and help it become an even greater revenue generator for your business. Need help designing a new website, or is your e-commerce platform caught behind the times? Feel free to drop us a line or shoot us an email, we would be happy to help your business reach even greater heights.
