Creating an e-commerce website

In today’s day and age, it’s not good enough to just have a website – it needs to have the right elements to attract visitors and potential customers to the page. A good website is essential to every e-commerce owner as it could be the deciding factor for customers to take up your service or product over competitors.

If you are looking up to set up your e-commerce store, here are some factors that will play a part in the building of your website.

What your website is for

Every company has different goals, and your goals need to be reflected in your website. Keep it simple and choose one goal to focus on so that it will be easier for you to do up your website. If you’re drawing a blank, some goals you can consider include: 

• Support your brand
• Showcase your personality
• It helps in creating a loyal fanbase
• It helps in spreading your message among your audience
• Try out different marketing strategies
• Sell/Promote your product
• Raise awareness

Elements to consider

No matter what type of website you are creating, you should include the following elements to provide a better experience to your customers.

• Grid

A core grid system should align well with positioning and alignment. It provides predictability and stability in behaviour to your website. If you need help choosing the size system of your grid, you can go to Bootstrap and check out some of the options that they offer.

• Content

Another important element is the type of content that you are showcasing on your website. It should value-add to your audience and give them knowledge about what you are selling. While creating your content, here are some tips that you should take into consideration.

• • Format all of your content such that it is easy to read and the message can be delivered right
  • Adjust your writing style to your user’s preference – keep sentences short and sweet, do not use convoluted vocabulary so that your language is easy to understand.
  • Categorise your content and add images so that the visual aspect of your website is simple and easy to digest.
  • Use white space and always use the right side.

• Call-to-action

A call-to-action can vary depending on what your goal is. For example, you want to collect your customer’s email address to send regular updates, or you might want to get feedback. All of this is done with a call-to-action button. When designing your call-to-action, there are some basic principles that you should follow:

• • Make sure it stands out
  • Use the button rectangle shape with round corners
  • Use action words
  • Use CSS styles at different places

• Navigation

Navigation is a well-executed list that can still be attractive by using different features. Many designers come up with new creative ideas such as using interactive hero areas with hotspots or circle-based navigations. No matter what design you use, you should note that a good navigation bar is necessary to provide a good user experience.

• Typography

There are many free resources available online for you to pick or design the typography of your choice. Things like free Google directory and affordable font services like Typekit have made typography for e-commerce much less of a hassle.

Website accessibility

It is a common myth that you won’t be able to create an inclusive and well-designed website without the experience. All you need is the right tools, which are all available online. Here are just some steps that you can implement to make your website accessible:

• Make proper use of colour
• Use font size in body up to 16px and line-height to 22-24px. Use only 18 words or 50-80 characters in every line.
• Use different styles of buttons to indicate different things 
• Use tables only to display tabular data

Designing a website

You don’t need to be some tech expert to create your website – even if you don’t know how to do it, there are websites such as Shopify, Wix or more that you can use to create your site. Their sites are fairly straightforward to use, so they should not pose many difficulties.

If you need any help with administration and accounting, feel free to reach out to our experienced team who will be more than willing to help you with your problems. Simply drop us a call or text on WhatsApp!