Architecting Your Perfect Online Storefront

From the comfort of your own couch you can now purchase anything you need and have it delivered to your front door the next day. Customers no longer need to get their keys, drive to a store, sit in traffic, and deal with all the hassle of physically buying items from a store. Due to this you can no longer rely simply on your store and your personable and charming employees to sell your product for you. As a customer, when you walk into a store you would only hope to be greeted by professional and polite employees. You would expect the store to be organized, be clean, smell nice, and overall make you feel comfortable buying a product there. The same concepts apply to your online storefront, but in an altered fashion. As a customer you expect the website to be accessible, easy to navigate, professional looking, and trustworthy. Building a good website to sell your products is essential to the success of your online business. Your website's look and feel is as important as the look, attitude, and professionalism of the employees in a physical store.

According to a research study titled Trust and Mistrust of Online Health Sites, 94 percent of people said the biggest reason they had for mistrusting a website was its design. Some of the major reasons they mistrusted a website were: 

• Busy or complex layouts

• Advertisements

• Boring web design

• Slow load times

• Small and hard to read fonts

For these reasons it is vital that your website design is good, or else you can lose customers within the first few seconds of them visiting your page. 

Wordpress has many different pre-made layouts that you can explore and test out until you find one that you think suits you and the style of website you would like. Wordpress website are highly customizable and it is easy to do so. As we continue to work together on creating the best website possible it is important that we do focus on concepts as I have pointed out above to ensure that any potential clientele is not scared away by a bad website design. Another important aspect is the actual content of any text on the website. Just like you would be able to do during an in person interaction with a customer, you should be able to build a connection and trust with the customer. It is helpful to have a section about the business or the owner to ensure that the customer can learn about the person or business they are buying from. Overall it is important that the content within the website is informative, concise, and relevant. Keeping these design points in mind and executing them well, will aid in making potential customers into actual customers.

A great example of what NOT to do when designing a website

Some statistics on importance of web design

References:

 Sillence, E., Briggs, P., Fishwick, L., & Harris, P. (2004, April 25). Trust and mistrust of online                      health sites. Retrieved October 12, 2015, from http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=985776 

 Understanding The Full Impact Of Web Design On SEO, Branding, And More. (2005, February 11).              Retrieved October 12, 2015, from                                                                                                              http://www.forbes.com/sites/drewhendricks/2015/02/11/understanding-the-full-impact-of-                  web-design-on-seo-branding-and-more/