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E-Commerce Website Design: The Challenges Of Creating A Great Website That Looks Good And Converts!

Date published: April 16, 2018
Last updated: April 16, 2018

Our web experience is largely visual. We love pretty things – looking at pretty pictures on Instagram, saving beautiful pins on Pinterest and visiting websites with impressive designs. Heck, we even click on ads if they look pleasing enough. There is not much space for ugly things in our online lives, even if they are informative and rewarding. Patience is not one of the virtues the larger section of website visitors is popular for. People will take less than 3 seconds to judge your website. Following that judgment, they will either leave or browse further.

That is exactly how vital website design is for your new e-commerce website. The daily challenges of website design for developers as well as website owners stem from the uncertainty about the need for some design elements. Ever since mobile devices took over e-commerce, it has been becoming increasingly difficult to differentiate design elements from features that enhance user experience (UX).

Challenge 1: Selecting a responsive design for your site

Responsive templates have been around for quite a few years. The average e-commerce website experiences about 60% of its organic traffic from mobile phones. There simply is no excuse left for business owners to not opt for a mobile-optimized design unless you are experiencing a lack of expert guidance. Without an experienced team of ecommerce website development experts, it will be difficult to create a responsive website.

  • Creating mobile ready websites that are fast and navigation friendly.
  • Rendering data tables on small screens of varying sizes.
  • Rearrangement of dynamic designing elements for devices of different dimensions.
  • Prolonged designing, testing and developing periods.

These are a few difficulties e-commerce site owners face during the development of a new responsive site.

Challenge 2: Keeping the e-commerce site informative yet fast loading

[bctt tweet="Did you know? Google has listed website loading speed as one of the top 3 ranking factors. " username="relevance"]

Once you overcome the challenge of creating a responsive yet fast loading site, you need to find a solution to loading speed problems once your e-commerce site starts gathering more content. People love websites that load in less than 2 seconds. The moment websites take more than 3 seconds to load visitors start fidgeting and often turn to competitor websites.

Did you know? Google has listed website loading speed as one of the top 3 ranking factors. It determines the UX to a great extent. E-commerce sites often fail this test since they forget to keep their backend load light. The growing number of products and their details demand the addition of plug-ins. Continuously growing bulk on the backend can create one of the biggest challenges for e-commerce sites.

Challenge 3: Finding original and informative content

E-commerce sites often forget to pay attention to their quality of website content. However, that seems to be a persistent problem among sites that are not ranking well in spite of offering excellent products, offers, and promotions. Direct product-based marketing is not cutting it anymore. E-commerce sites need to emphasize on genuine content as much as other websites to rank better in the Google SERPs.

Your e-commerce site needs a strong keyword game. Almost all websites are facing the need for a dedicated content team that can provide them with fresh, original and informative content. In fact, a great content strategy can always remain a potential for your upcoming content marketing campaigns. Designing rewarding content that appeals to both search engine bots and human readers is often a challenging task for webmasters.

Challenge 4: Creating navigation that acts as a guidance system

Creating effective navigation for your e-commerce site does not involve introducing a ridiculous number of options. Research shows, people browsing websites during their leisure time do not like to deal with too many options. If you are providing them with too many menu options, you are confounding them further instead of pampering them. You need to make your navigation clear and uni-directional. Here are a few things you must consider before starting your work on your website navigation options –

  • Create distinct visual hierarchies using your design elements
  • Keep the clickable options identifiable through colors and patterns
  • Eliminate all distractions
  • Break the pages up into distinct areas
  • Stick to conventions while designing a rewarding UX

When website designers fail to eliminate the distractions and visual cues that point to nowhere, it leads to lowering the quality of UX. To determine what works for your site and what doesn't invest some time and effort in A/B testing of navigation options for your new e-commerce site. The correct interpretation of the results of your A/B test will help you understand which website navigation design your visitors like more.

Challenge 5: Designing CTAs that attract attention and boost customer conversion rate

A great CTA design can define your UX. The landing page of your e-commerce site serves two distinct purposes –

  1. To explain what the site is about
  2. To egg the visitors on through the sales funnel

Amazon has one of the simplest, yet most effective CTA designs. The basic quality of a good CTA should be a noticeable color and font. You should use the primary action only once in the entire page. Use conventional button copies – "Buy now," "Shop Now," "Start," "Register" or "Add to Cart" for better visitor responses. Using conventional buttons that can state their purpose always boosts conversion rate. You need to help people make the buying decision by providing them easily understandable and unmissable Call-to-Actions. Several e-commerce websites miss this point by applying CTA-like qualities to regular content. This can be rather disappointing for your regular visitor. The true CTA should be exciting and actionable. You cannot use "See More" as your CTA if you want people to buy what you are selling.

The success of an e-commerce store relies on website design to a great extent. 2018 is a year that has blurred the line between website design and user experience. Modern website developers are trying to keep their designs clean and light by eliminating features that do not serve any purpose. Do you know how your e-commerce site is performing? Are you thinking of revisiting your website design? This is the perfect time to analyze, research and reconstruct your e-commerce product by new trends.

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