Your Maropost Commerce webstore design, in many cases, is the determining factor for a lot of customers as to whether they will buy from you or not. Broken or poor-quality looking web pages will usually scare people off; the credibility and trust disappear, and people are worried that you might process the orders with the same types of faults as your web shop.
When choosing a theme, try and think about layout you would like to use for your store, some of the designs you've seen in the past that have caught your eye and see if we have a pre-made theme that fits your requirements. All of our themes are fully responsive, so any theme you choose will work out of the box on both desktops and mobiles.
There are 5 primary things you should consider when deciding on your theme:
- Design/Structure
- Features
- Colour Scheme
- Customisation
- Browser Compatibility
Design/Structure
When it comes to eCommerce websites, it’s not primarily about having a cutting-edge and flashy design.
It's a given that an online store has to be appealing to draw visitors in, but more importantly, an online store has to be functional and user-friendly.
When choosing your website template, put the user experience first. Choose a layout that will allow your visitors and customers to easily do what they came to your site for – shop.
You want simple, intuitive layouts and designs that make site navigation, product searches, and shopping workflow easy for your customers.
Simple doesn’t have to mean boring though. Use white space, a vital part of any website design, to make your images pop and text blocks more readable. Add some creative touches and interesting content to make your website stand out, to reinforce your brand or to provide a fun shopping experience.
Features
An amazing web shop design can be let down if your website lacks necessary, fundamental features, some of which may be specific to your business only.
Look at other websites in your industry vertical to get an idea of what features to use and combine these with your own understanding of your business to determine the features you will attract visitors, and more importantly buyers to your web store. There are various features that Maropost Commerce supports that you could use, such as:
Colour Scheme
It's important to carefully choose your web shop's colour Scheme as this will help to form your online identity. The obvious choice would be to choose a colour scheme that matches your business and brand.
Choose one colour that you believe best represents your business identity, like the most prominent colour in your logo or products. Then you can choose two more colours to form a monochromatic, analogous, or complementary colour scheme from, giving your web shop a harmonious look.
-
Monochromatic colours are all the colours (tints, tones, and shades) of a single hue. Monochromatic colour schemes are derived from a single base hue and extended using its shades, tones and tints. Tints are achieved by adding white and shades and tones are achieved by adding a darker colour, grey or black.
-
Analogous colours are groups of three colours that are next to each other on the colour wheel, with one being the dominant colour, which tends to be a primary or secondary colour, and a tertiary. Red, orange, and red-violet are examples.
-
Complementary Colours are any two Hues positioned exactly opposite each other on the Basic Colour Wheel. Here, as an example I've chosen Red and its opposite Green. We tend to think of this pairing as typically intense Christmas colours.
You can also try colour psychology which, involves techniques that use colour to influence customer perceptions. For instance, yellow-and-red is often used to evoke excitement while a black-and-white combination gives a formal or clean appearance. A blue-white-grey palette is calming while shades of brown evoke warmth and coziness. Analyse how you want customers to perceive you and choose a colour scheme that can best create that impression.
Tip: Try to avoid things like a strong red
Add to Cart buttons. This can give the impression that it's a
negative action to some users. We consider all call to action buttons important, directly effecting sales conversions, so keeping the call to action buttons as positive colours and reserving negative ones for errors and alerts can make a world of difference.
If you would like to read more on colour psychology, we recommend taking a look at coschedule's fantastic blog post on this topic.
Customisation
When selecting a theme to use ensure the customisation options suit your needs. Not all templates are made equal and some may allow for more customisation than others. All Maropost Commerce themes have some form of customisation though, so don't worry if you don't know HTML.
On the other hand, all Maropost Commerce themes also give you the ability to add and modify the HTML and CSS, allowing you to make quick and easy changes of colours, backgrounds, fonts and other elements.
Tip: Need FTP details? Request them
here.
Customising your site is fun but don’t get too carried away. Remember, you don’t want just a pretty website but one that sells too. So, make sure that every element added or changes done to the website theme have a purpose that will benefit your online store. Otherwise, you’re just cluttering your site with features that are unnecessary and can detract from the customer experience.
Browser Compatibility
As you know, there are a myriad of different internet browsers. One browser can display your website very differently than another, which can affect not only the appearance of your site but also user experience. Therefore, it is important that you choose a theme that is compatible with most, if not all web browsers to give visitors a consistent look and feel.
All Maropost Commerce themes adhere to best practices as much possible in an attempt to avoid displaying and functioning incorrectly across all browsers.
Also, it’s very important nowadays for businesses to adopt a mobile strategy because of ever-increasing mobile device usage. As such, all Maropost Commerce themes are 100% mobile responsive. This means your web shop will seamlessly work across both desktops and mobile devices without any additional work required.
Related Articles