Web Design Corners You Shouldn’t Cut

When you’re setting up your eCommerce business, it’s tempting to try and get everything up and running as fast as possible. There are some places, though, were rushing now is only going to cost you time and money in the long run. Your website is one of these places. While there are some things you can do to put your website together faster, you never want to do that at the expense of quality. Your website is what makes the first impression on your potential customers, and it is vital that it is a good one.

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Pre-planning Isn’t Wasted Time

A good website requires a good deal of preplanning. You need to figure out how customers will navigate your website, what essential information needs to be on the landing page, color and design themes and what social media connections you need to integrate. Start by prioritizing the five three important things your customers will need to access. These should all be readily accessible from the main page. Next, work out the broad categories that apply to the content for your website. These should be intuitive, so your customers can easily identify where different information will be.

Out of the Box Templates

Website templates are an effective way to save time on web design. Templates let you put together parts of your website quickly and without coding. However, if you are going to use templates, you need to be smart about it. You should never use a template without customizing it first. Take the time to set up a unified color scheme. If you are using pictures, make sure they are in a consistent style and fit in with the template well. Don’t use any of the stock images if you can help it. That’s one place where paying a little more for a good graphic designer will go a long way. Another thing to consider is hiring a web design and development company. While you may not need it for the entire site, many web design companies will discount initial setups that are essentially customizing a template for you.

Always Test It

Before your website goes live, it needs to be tested. Have people who have never used the site before explore it on different devices. Give them set areas of the site to access and things to do, but also ask for general feedback. Pay attention to areas of frustration and things that went wrong, but also note what works well. Once the test is done, spend at least a week working through the feedback and figuring out ways to improve the problem spots and capitalize on the effective things. Like preplanning, this is not a step to rush. It will save you far more time if you do this all first, rather than wait until after the website is live and you’re dealing with a spat of customer complaints.

There are many ways to save time and money on web design. However, with something this important to your business’s future, you should never rush the process.