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The 4 Steps of Online Store Design

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The design of your online store is crucial to the success of your business.  Eight in 10 Americans are now shopping online, according to a study from Pew Research in December 2016. To turn your share of those people into paying customers, you’ll need a web design team with a solid plan in place to create an amazing website efficiently.

Ventura Web Design & Marketing has over 20 years of experience, and our design process has four steps. We present those to you here as an example of an effective web design plan:

Step 1:  Project Manager Consultation

A project manager will reach out and setup a consultation with you.  You’ll work with them to ensure that your brand and marketing message are effectively conveyed on your new website.

To convey your brand effectively, we learn about your business goals, we identify your customers, and evaluate your competition.  We also take into account your design preferences and branding.  From there craft a design and implementation plan, including on-going support and marketing, and address any questions.

Once they we’ve solidified these key elements, you trust the design, layout, and appearance of your website to our professional team.

Step 2: Review and Revise the Proposed Design

Our team will create custom mockups of your website.  We always strive to create the perfect design the first time around, but we’re happy to revise the website up to two times at no additional cost.  This is to ensure that you are absolutely satisfied with your website design before it is installed.

Step 3: Install the Approved Design

At this point, you can focus on running your existing business while we install the approved website design on your store platform. Any modifications that you wish to make after you have given design and installation approval will be billed at the regular hourly rate.

Step 4: New Store Basic Training

Once installed and tested, we walk you through the basics of maintaining and extending the quality of your new website. If you need any extra help, you’re also welcome to contact us during regular business hours.

Your customer designed site will be complete in under a month.  A typical design produced from this process has around 4 to 5 top navigation items and up to 10 internal content pages.  Once your site is built, Ventura also offers support services available by request.

The hardest part of any process is getting started, but taking the first step can change your business for a lifetime.  Contact our professional web design team and let them help you, with just a few easy steps, to get your business back on top.

Better Site Navigation

8 Tips For a Better Site Navigation

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Your site navigation is one of the most important features of your storefront and overlooking any aspect of it can be catastrophic to your business. If you want to sell more, your customers need to be able to find what they want with ease. Any good store design begins and ends with a positive user experience, which always relies heavily on the simplicity of your navigation.

There are far too many online stores that spend a great deal of time on designing large, beautiful site images, only to offer a sub-par and confusing navigation structure. You can design the most beautiful and effective landing pages for your products, but it won’t matter if customers can’t find them.

With this in mind, here are our top recommendations for improving how people navigate your online store:

1. Simple & Apparent Navigation

Though it seems obvious to say, your navigation must be simple to use, easy to find, and consistent through all pages. Users have to learn how to use every new website they visit, so making your navigation structure the same throughout your site will make it easier for them to understand. Navigation menus should never interfere with other site functionality.

2. Top-Level Menu Items

The pages/categories that are at the top of your navigation structure must be intuitive and obvious. Each of these must be on the same level of importance. Don’t place categories in the top level that make more sense to be subcategories of another category. Your store should be structured like a tree, with the most important branches supporting smaller branches.

3. Clickable Categories

Everything in your navigation menu should be clickable. If you have a category with 3 sub-categories under it, customers should still be able to click to a page for the master category, even if that page only has a short category description and links to the sub categories.

4. Number of 1st and 2nd Level Items

It’s important to limit the number of 1st and 2nd level items in your navigation structure. If there too many, the category will feel too heavy and may be best served by splitting it up.

5. Obvious Labels

Terms that are used in your navigation must be easy to understand and not overlap. If the customer is confused by what category they should look in to find a particular item, then your category labels should be made clearer.

6. Featured Product Display

You can implement a featured product display within a “megamenu”-style navigation to show a good example of what kind of products will be found within a category, and possibly get your customers to the most popular products faster.

7. Intuitive Breadcrumbs

Make sure to include a useful breadcrumb trail on every page on your site to show your current location in the site structure so that users to navigate easily to parent pages. If you have a page that exists in more than one parent category, consider displaying two different breadcrumb paths so that users have a choice when navigating backward through the site structure.

8. Single Navigation Menu

Whenever possible, your site navigation should not compete with any other menus so that users do not get confused. If you have a navigation menu that spans the top of the page, do not have a competing menu on a left sidebar, or another menu on top for items of lesser importance.

5 Tips for Properly Merchandising Your Online Store

5 Tips for Properly Merchandising Your Online Store

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Properly merchandising your online store is just as important as merchandising a brick-and-mortar store. Having a well-merchandised store can lead to increased conversion rates and higher average ticket sizes.

Online merchandising is, at its most basic, a way of displaying your products that entices your customers to make a purchase. There are a myriad of different ways and methods to properly merchandise your store. We will take a look at some of the most important.

  1. Make sure people can easily find what they are looking for. This includes proper categorization of your inventory. A store with poor categorization can be a nightmare for your potential customers to navigate through. Make sure your navigation is clear and easy to follow. The fewer steps a customer needs to take to get to the product the better. Make sure your store has a search function.
  2. Provide unique product descriptions. Writing your own product descriptions is more important than having your own product photography. Using the same generic product description is going to hurt your SEO as Google will see it as duplicate content, and you will be lucky to make it on page one of the search results. Writing your own compelling product descriptions will give you the opportunity to include any important keywords that the manufacturer may have missed. It also allows you to optimize the content to your customers and fit within your store’s culture.
  3. Use high quality photos and product descriptions not provided by the manufacturer. This may seem like a no-brainer, but many stores just use the product descriptions and photos provided by the manufacturer. Using the same photos and descriptions as your competitors will not set you apart from the crowd. If possible, hire a professional photographer to take product photos for you.If professional photography is out of the budget, take your own photographs. You should only take your own photographs if you can match or exceed the quality of the photos that the manufacturer supplies. Poor photography shows a lack of attention to detail and makes your business look like an amateur operation. Make use of alternate images by showing different angles of the products or a close-up of important details.
  4. Make sure any promotions you are running are prominently featured. Use attractive banners with compelling graphics on the home page to draw attention to your promotions. If you run promotions that are category specific ,don’t forget to add banners to the category page as well. Feature your best selling products or newest items on your home page. And don’t miss the opportunity to cross-sell and up-sell by adding related / alternative products and accessories on your product pages.
  5. Make it easy for your customers to make a purchase from you. You have done a good job of merchandising your store, you have killer photos and product descriptions, cross-sell and up-sell is properly set-up, and promotions are prominently featured. All this hard work could be wasted if it is difficult for your customers to make a purchase. Make sure your buy button is prominently featured and easy for customers to see.The checkout process should be as streamlined as possible. Do you force customers to sign up for an account before they can buy from you, or can they check out as a guest? Remove any obstacles that may prevent a guest from completing the checkout steps. Do you offer PayPal as a checkout option? Many consumers are reluctant to give credit card information to merchants they are unfamiliar with, but they will use PayPal since that information isn’t passed on to the merchant and it gives the customer a degree of better security.

Merchandising your entire store can be a difficult and time-consuming task, but it’s certainly worth the boost in conversions and customer engagement. Ventura offers professional, personalized assistance in merchandising your online store. Contact us today to see how we can help you.