Designing a new website on the popular platform Shopify is absolutely possible if you have a plan of action.
Knowing who your target audience is, can guide the direction of web design you wish to portray.
With your brand guidelines, utilising textures, photography, colours and typography, you can help your user navigate, be inspired, and ultimately make a purchase.
We have created web designs for Shopify for very small budget clients selling a handful of products, up to larger businesses that are more established, and have a vast array of products variations and collections.
Some examples of these can be found in our portfolio.
Plan what you think your customers might expect to see when using your website, for example, would they find it easier to narrow down their search, using a searchbox?
Or traversing through curated Collections? Perhaps a filtering system based on Attributes, such as size, colour, who the item is for, manufacturer?
Consider the user journey and remember that they will not always necessarily come through the website from the homepage.
They could come straight onto a product page, or even a blog post – these are opportunities to cross-reference other related products or even products related to that particular article.
Combining marketing pages with eCommerce is a great way to talk more about your brand, your vision and goals, who you are as a business – whether solo or a team.
You have an opportunity to share what impact you have in your community or environment from people buying from you.
Are you an ethical merchant?
Do you offer free delivery within your locale?
These are sections you can incorporate into your web design.
Displaying customer reviews, customer photos or testimonials of your products can be beneficial for building trust with your users and potential customers.
This can reinforce how good the product is, how fast your delivery service was, or even better, your customer service when they may have experienced an issue.
Add-ons such as Trustpilot, or simply displaying star ratings and comments can help build a positive user experience.
Keeping the layout simple and easy to use and clear call-to-action, such as large buttons, or use of colour, to encourage the customer to make the purchase is key.
Shopify uses Themes for web design and has a wealth of options for you to choose from. You can download a free Theme from their library, you can buy a Theme “off-the-shelf” and you can also have a custom Theme designed and built.
Whilst free or off-the-shelf themes are cheaper and easy to get your shop up and running – especially if you’re a startup – they may lack the functionality you specifically need, or, may not reflect your business brand and voice.
Ensuring your web design is on-brand can be a key component to building trust with your customers, it shows consistency across all touchpoints, from emails to social media to packaging.
In addition, with the new 2.0 version of Shopify, you can have more control over page layout and configure sections of content and layout beyond just the homepage.
This will give you more flexibility to create some great landing pages which could be based on a particular marketing campaign, a seasonal offer, or a particular collection you wish to highlight.
Often, web designers will create wireframes of a website to get these key components laid out, such as navigation and user journey, so the structure and foundations are clear, before delving into colours, graphics and photography.
If you are looking to go the bespoke route, check out several agency websites and their portfolios, to see if their style and values, match with your web design and business vision.
At Blueocto this is a process that we like to use and we can discuss this with you as a client to ensure that it will meet your users’ needs.
