“It may be worth considering optimising your site and going for a responsive design.”
The traditional navigation design is placed either of two ways: vertically or horizontally. Most businesses won’t even think twice about placing it one way or the other. But you need to be crystal clear about your reasoning for doing so.
If you have fewer categories, you’ll want a horizontal design as it will allow you to stretch across the top. A more comprehensive navigation tree, however, will demand a vertical design, as you’ll be able to fit in more options without appearing cluttered.
Choose carefully. You don’t get a second first impression, and customers will definitely leave if your design isn’t up to scratch.
When you’re browsing an online store, it doesn’t necessarily need to be the most perfectly designed storefront in the world. But it certainly needs to look nice. And so far, there haven’t been a huge number of businesses that have managed to create a site that is simply good to look at.
But good design goes further. You need to build loyalty with your customers. As a result, every single page needs to include a few different things. One of them is your branding.
“Make sure your logo is on every page,” says Scarrott. “Because we have limited time to make an impression with a customer, you need to make sure everything is on brand with the business.”
There is nothing worse than reading a really horrible font. For any website, it’s an annoyance. But if you’re an online retailer, not only are you making yourself look bad, but you’re potentially losing a lot of sales.
As Scarrott argues, you only have a limited time to actually get a customer’s attention. This means you need to pick everything clearly, including your fonts.
But there’s another aspect you need to consider as well, and that is fonts need to be read across many different versions of internet browsers and monitors.
“You really need to make sure you’re using HTML readable fonts for all aspects of your website,” says Scarrott. “Make sure you’re testing them for different screens, monitors, and browsers. It needs to be really simple for them to understand.”
So many retailers just pick a manufacturer’s description for a product and shift it on their website. There are two major problems with this.
The first is that Google really hates duplicate content. So if you’re picking a description from another site and then placing it on your own, then you’re not going to be viewed as the original source of that content – which is horrible for your rankings.
The second problem with this is that it simply doesn’t look good. It’s boring. Check some of the group buying sites and see how original they are with content. They use witty descriptions and crack jokes. It’s a time to show off your personality.
Chris Thomas says it’s important you put some effort into these descriptions, even if you need to hire a copywriter.
“Even if you hire someone for a week, you need to be working on those descriptions.”
“You don’t need to do everything at once. Pick your battles, work on the products that sell best, and then move on.”
Recently, 4Cabling chief executive Nicole Kersh told SmartCompany she was able to start an entirely new website by just monitoring sales data. Thomas says you need to be doing the same.
Websites are able to track a range of data. If you’re not taking advantage of that, then you really should be.
“Track that data, and use it to make good investments about where you’re going to focus your attention in terms of improving site performance,” he says.
If you’ve gone through your website and you don’t necessarily have anything much to change, that could be a sign you’re doing everything right. And when it comes to online retail, or anything digital, change can actually be a bad thing.
As Chris Thomas says, customers get used to certain navigation styles. Don’t be too quick to just change something for change’s sake. It also means if something is an industry standard, you probably shouldn’t move away from that unless you have a really, really good reason.
“Every type of reinvention presents some sort of risk, and people have to relearn how they do things.”
“Diverting from tried, trusted and accepted design formats is not generally the way to go.”
Patrick Stafford is a freelance journalist and a former deputy editor of SmartCompany.
