Website design, while certainly vital from an aesthetic point of view, encompasses much more. Especially, for an e-commerce store, its design can affect from SEO and traffic to branding and conversion rates. A good website design will take you one step closer to making a sale or getting in touch.
Therefore, we will reveal 5 secrets to help you create a perfect website design and enhance your internet presence.
Secret #1: Show explicitly that you are selling
All websites must have a plain purpose and the e-commerce ones are not exceptions. As an online store, you need to show your customers that the website is selling, not for education or entertainment.
To be more specific, what should be focused on are products images, product details, and “add-to-cart” buttons. It seems to be obvious but in many cases, the website designers “forget” to make these things stand out and just pay more attention to how to make the site look cool and creative.
Secret #2: Only accept responsive and mobile-friendly website design
In recent years, there has been a trend that more and more customers turn to go shopping online on mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones rather than on desktops. Therefore, it is urgent to make your online store responsive and presented nicely on different devices.
Otherwise, your site might trigger customers’ inconvenience and lose plenty of potential purchasers. Besides putting an eye on responsiveness, you also need to study carefully how to make your site become mobile-friendly.
For example, all of the font sizes and button sizes must be designed appropriately – at least 14 px for font size, and the bigger the button, the better. Also, the default zoom should be eliminated since it can lead to a mess in your layout.
Secret #3: Make the navigation simple and effective
Navigation can be considered as one of the most essential factors in deciding whether a website design is good or not. No matter how beautiful your online store is, if the buyers cannot find the items they need or confront any hindrances during the purchasing process, they will leave.
A fundamental navigation rule that can be ignored is “3 clicks” – a visitor should be able to find any information in your store with a maximum of 3 mouse clicks. Moreover, it is recommended to place the navigation on the top horizontal or on the left sidebar.
There are several extensions that help you to enhance your navigation significantly with little effort such as the Magento 2 Layered Navigation Extension. By applying this, your customers can filter all products at ease and definitely get what they are looking for in just a few seconds.
Secret #4: Concentrate on website usability
A website having good usability means that it is user-friendly and easy to use. For an e-commerce website, usability is more important than ever since it affects directly sales.
To improve the usability, let’s “put yourself in the customers’ shoes” and list out all possible tasks that you might do on the site. After that, you must find the answers to the two questions: how you can achieve these tasks and how you want them to be.
Secret #5: Visual is still crucial
In the first secret, we advised several times that you should not focus only on creating an eye-catching website design and ignore other pivotal factors.
However, it doesn’t mean that visual effects are not essential. No one would be exciting to explore a boring and less aesthetic site. If your store looks unappealing and old-fashioned, the customers might assume that your products and services have low-quality and are obsolete as well.
In conclusion, to possess an excellent website design you must ensure:
- The site sets off what you are selling
- It is responsive and mobile-friendly
- It owns simple and intuitive navigation
- It is easy-to-use
- It is aesthetically appealing
