Even if you’ve hired a really great web developer, designing your website in terms of its physical appearance can be tough; because of course…it’s mainly up to you!
To take some of the hassle out of doing so, it’s a good way to split it up into the main categories that make up your website’s appearance. This includes the layout/theme/template of the site, the fonts you use for your text and the colour scheme you opt for. We’ve put together a guide that’s split into these three categories to hopefully help you make an informed decision.
Layout/template
When creating an ecommerce website, its design won’t necessarily need to be flashy, overly complicated or OTT. The most important things it will need to be is easy to navigate around, and visually appealing. It’s so vital to put the user first when designing a website in terms of its layout – think about functionality and usability.
Sticking to a simple layout can be a really good idea (especially at first) and simple doesn’t have to mean ‘boring’. It also should still include necessary features that all online shop websites need, such as a new products section, popular products section, a search bar, a store finder and payment info/icons.
Fonts
We thought we’d start this section with a pretty obvious statement just to get the ball rolling; the main thing your font needs to be is readable. It’s really not that difficult to make your website’s text easy to read, yet so many websites do fall at this hurdle; using complicated fonts or using a font size that’s far too small, or cramping all the text together in a short space. Therefore, if you can avoid this, you may already be ahead of some of your competitors! Have a look around at different fonts online for commercial use to see which styles work for your brand, too.
Choosing a font for its readability can be measured both when looking at the headings but also, more importantly, the body of the text – your main copy. Test how small you can make your font and still be able to read it to determine whether it’s a good fit, as the text will need to be pretty small when it comes to reading it on things like phones and tablets.
Colours
The colour of your website will become your main key for brand identification, so it’s vital that you choose it wisely. It’s also a tool at your disposal in terms of creativity and aesthetic value, and you can read more about creative ideas for websites here.
It’s important to not only think about what colours look good in terms of representing your brand and working together to make a visually pleasing website, but also what colours work well on screen. Some colours will look very different in real life for example as they do on a computer. Here’s a guide of 4096 web-friendly colours to help with this.