Have you ever happened to come into a store and leave right away only because you didn’t like how the interior looked?
In ecommerce, your website is just like the interior of a store. If visitors dislike what they see, they’ll leave. So how do you attract your customers? Have a look at these essential tips on how to make a good website.
#1 Set goals
Before actually starting the site development, you should determine the goals of your site. In other words, you should answer the question ‘Why do people need it?’
Think of what kind of company you have, what category of people you work for, what you want to tell people, what is good about your company that differs it from others, etc. The answers to these questions determine the design of your website, its style and visual content, as well as many other things.
For example, soft pastel colors, cute drawings or pictures and simple language will suit a website devoted to animals – let’s say a pet accessories online shop. But what if you sell bathroom fitment?
The design described above will make your site look like a joke. Seriously, who would ever buy bathroom fitment from a shop that looks like a Barbie house! So before proceeding to the next step, think about it carefully.
#2 Navigation
The first important step in creating a good website is developing its structure, or working on navigation.
In retail stores, we expect all the elements to be easy to find. A customer should be able to find merchandises and the checkout easily and quickly. Same goes to your website. Even a person who uses a PC for the first time in life should be able to find what he or she needs. Several tips:
- Make the site menu brief and simple.
- Make sure you have ‘About us’, ‘Contacts’ and other useful pages.
- Put the link to the homepage on your logo.
- Use a fixed menu that you can always see.
- Highlight the active menu option so that visitors can see where they are.
- Hide some of the content and use ‘show more’ buttons if you think there’s too much information.
- Use branched structure with categories and subcategories, if you have large amounts of content such as product categories at web shops and affiliate stores. You can learn about how to make a good affiliate store here.
- Use ‘Back/Up’ button which allows you to go back to the top of the site from any place on the page.
#3 Design
Now that you have your website’s skeleton, it’s time to add some flesh, and we’ll start with design. The choice of colors, buttons’ shape, animation – all of it is determined by the main theme of your site. So the tips on how to make a good website here are the following:
- Avoid bright and violent colors. It’s hard to browse the page when your eyes are bleeding.
- Use light background and a bit darker shades for buttons, columns, etc. Not vice versa.
- Be simple. Use simple colors, simple fonts, simple icons.
- Don’t make it too heavy. Make sure the design doesn’t slow down your website’s work.
- Animation isn’t always a good idea. Be careful with that.
#4 Content
Your website has a convenient structure and looks good. Now it’s time to add content. And the very first thing here is text.
Text is going to comprise the most part of your site. Not only because language is more informative than any other type of code, but also because you will need to optimize your website for search engines that work with texts mostly.
- Use unique texts. It’s the first rule of SEO.
- Use simple, comprehensible and above all grammatically correct language.
- Separate paragraphs from each other with blank space; such text is easier to read.
- Make paragraphs short.
- Make sure your texts are interesting and / or useful, otherwise there’s no point in having good looking article about nothing.
Visual content is another important part of your website. Large amount of texts makes it boring to browse, while pictures, infographics and schemes are a good addition to the content.
#5 Additional functionality
It’s a good idea to add some functionality to your website such as online currency rate informer, a calculator and so on. But make sure your visitors actually need them. For example, a weather informer will look weird at almost any website, except for those devoted to weather, climate and maybe tourism.
