Just as traditional retailers rely on an attractive window display to lure people in, your company’s website is a shop window onto the internet. It needs to attract customers and tempt them ‘inside’ to buy, so the design of your site is therefore essential to eCommerce success.
As people increasingly turn to the internet first for their everyday needs, ranging across everything from food to lawyers, a good website is an essential requirement for companies competing to win their business.
The Look
A website needs to be attractive to prospective customers, so how it looks is vitally important. This is not all that different to setting out a physical shop. If your site looks cluttered, dated or uncared for it’s less likely to attract people to browse than one which looks smart, modern and clearly communicates what’s on offer.
Internet users have notoriously short attention spans, so you need to get across quickly what it is that you’re selling. The front page of the site – and even its address – should help to communicate this. You also need to ensure you have accurate product names and detailed descriptions, good quality images of your products, photographed from several angles, or better still a video of the product in action.
User Friendliness
However good your site looks, it won’t be successful if people find it hard to navigate. You therefore need to make it as user-friendly as possible. A good firm offering web design in Belfast such as http://www.rycomarketing.co.uk/web-design-belfast-northern-ireland.html will be able to help you achieve this.
An effective site will guide the user through the whole process from the time they first arrive on the home page. Everything a user needs to complete a purchase should be easy to find, from selecting colours and sizes to choosing delivery options and completing payment. A good site will guide the user through the whole process and not leave them floundering around looking for a particular option.
Perhaps the most important thing your website needs to do is to take casual visitors and convert them into paying customers. Good design on its own can’t do this – you still need to have a product that people actually want to buy – but it can certainly help to ensure that people are going to buy from you rather than from your competitors.