With more and more people turning to the Internet as a sales channel for their products, e-commerce web design is becoming more and more competitive. With many sites offering the same products, or very similar ones, the context in which those products are presented greatly affects the chances of an online shop being successful. This article will give you some tips that you can use to improve your e-commerce web design and make it more attractive to your visitors.
Images
On an e-commerce site, pictures are extremely important. Users cannot touch the goods or see them, so they settle for second best, which is high quality pictures. This affects web design by making the images the center of the page, and something the design must work to enhance and display on its best light. Images can also come in lots of different colours, so the background colour of the web design for an e-commerce site needs to be able to accommodate that. Vivid colours that clash easily are better avoided for this reason, unlike on other sites where text is the main content and the images can be chosen to match the design.
Checkout
An e-commerce website is no good unless customers actually check out their purchases. For this reason, when designing an online shop is necessary to remember that the calls to action and instructions on the checkout process must be easy to find and follow. Websites whose goal is just getting visitors to read their content can be more playful, but an e-commerce that has a design that is too complex may turn visitors off and take their custom elsewhere.
Navigation
E-commerce websites need to be easy to navigate, so the visitors can easily find the products they are after. Including elements such as promotions, suggested products or good search filtering will make an online shop more usable and so more successful. Generally e-commerce websites layouts follow a set of standards and can look a bit like a grid, but it's not a good idea to be too innovative unless your audience is specially trendy and willing to make the extra effort to find website elements that aren't where every other website has it.
SEO optimization
Search Engine Optimization is vital for any website to be found, and needs to be incorporated right from the first line of HTML code to get the best results and avoid costly redesigns of the site. Even if it doesn't directly affect the graphic design of the site, making sure the front-end developer uses the right markup and that most of the e-commerce content is in the form of text as opposed to images will go a long way to make the website accessible for the search engine crawlers. If lots of content is hidden within flash movies it will be necessary to create an alternative HTML version that search engines and users with disabilities can use.
In many cases, online shoppers have some expectations on how an online shop is supposed to look and work, and familiarity increases the chances of them actually trusting it with their credit card numbers. By following those simple tips when designing a website for e-commerce you can increase the chances of the website being successful and visitors choose it to purchase their products.