Consumers who are familiar with shopping online and searching the web will come across many websites competing for their attention. A good look and feel, clear navigation and user-friendly design are key to helping a site stand out in the crowd.
Recent studies have proven that websites have no more than two minutes to win over customers, so you need to make an impact fast.
Having spent years designing and providing ecommerce websites Shopcreator have a wealth of experience in this field. Shopcreator's Transact product may well be an entry level product, however it can hold it's own on the design front! Shopcretor's designers have put their hard earned knowledge to work in the Transact product creating an array of layouts and colur schemes with various proven simple and effective navigation systems, so your customer will find shopping online simple and satisfying.
With such little time to engage the consumer, it often helps to adopt a "less is more" approach when presenting information and provide clear signs as to where the user needs to go once they have arrived. A good e-commerce site should be clean and easy to use, with intuitive navigation and clear, simple categories that point shoppers in the right direction.
Action The homepage of a website is much like the front door or entrance to a high street shop. The customer should immediately be able to see which section they need to go to in order to find what they’re looking for – and if there are a lot of sections or levels to choose from, clear sign-posting is required. On certain pages in your site you may also like to include useful links to related areas, however do take care not to overload customers with information once they’ve started shopping.
A good overall approach is to keep it simple and focus on key messages and calls to action, through clean visuals and concise wording.
The company logo should usually be featured in a key position on a website (top left hand corner is standard) and will often be the basis for the colour scheme of the site – for example in the navigation tabs, page headers and other design features. The look and feel of a website should be consistent with printed materials and advertising to create better brand awareness.
If your website is going to have dark colours or backgrounds, you may want to balance this with brighter images and features to avoid a heavy look and feel. Colour scheme and contrasting also play a key role in making a website more accessible to users with visual impairments, as it can have a significant impact on readability.
No matter how tempting it might be to place images all over a website – remember that as well as cluttering up pages, this can also affect download times. If your site takes a relatively long time to load each page, customers may start to lose patience and move on. When you add an image to a Transact site it is automatically optimised ensuring that it will load as quickly as possible without any loss in quality.
If you need to display a lot of product images on your site, ensure that they are at a reduced to a size that is right for the web. Images for print (such as those that might be used in your advertising) need to be much higher resolution and are therefore much heavier than those used for the web. Images for the web can be much smaller in size yet still maintain strong visual quality.
Shopcreator Transact offers 40 templates which in turn have up to 18 colour schemes. It also offers auto image resizing and the ability to display products in multiple departments.
All of the points mentioned above are covered and provided in the Transact package 'straight out of the box' providing you with a professional looking, fast ecommerce site where customers can find and buy your products easily and quickly.
As Shopcreator Transact is a “content management system” driven website, a lot of the design and layout concerns are removed allowing you to simply add text and upload images. Easy to access, install and use.