The things that make a website great are somewhat debatable, but they all seem to fall under three categories: attributes, technology and organization. Under these three large umbrellas, there is a lot of room for creativity, passion and fun, all of which are important to get the consumer to click on the buy button.
Attributes of Great Design
The look and feel of a website is dependent on the attributes used. Content, typeface and color all fall under this category. There is a lot of distance between the viewer's first look at your site and the actual purchase of your product. Although the quality of your products is important, it will take some time before the product is the item that your customers share across social media. Great writing and engaging pictures will draw in an audience from which to develop a marketing base. If you are not a brilliant writer, hire a freelancer to do it for you.
Since you are selling a product online, images are one of your most important attributes. Your product pictures need to be high-quality, high-resolution images that are responsive to the device and needs of the user. You also need to be able to zoom, rotate and overlay pictures. If you are going to throw some money into your web design, put it towards your photography budget.
Technology That Works for You
Responsiveness is not only important for your images in your web structure. It is a background technology that should be incorporated throughout your web design. There are more mobile devices than there are people in the world. More people use their smartphones for web browsing and shopping than any other device. So, if your webpages are designed for a desktop, this will not cut it on a mobile device.
Responsive technology is background coding that pulls information from the user and reconfigures the site to meet their specialized needs. Images are one place where responsiveness is important, but this coding method also moves menus, creates dropdowns and generally makes the mobile site usable.
Organization That Moves Your Viewer's Eye
After bringing together great content and responsive design, the last of the website quality criteria is organization. Simply put, if users cannot find a product, they cannot buy it. Since Amway is one of the largest of the e-commerce retailers, let's use them as an example of pulling everything together into one well-organized website.
The organization of the site is in a classic zig-zag pattern that matches the user's natural eye movement. Researchers have found that, for languages that are read from left to right, internet users view a website in certain patterns. For example, the Gutenberg pattern holds that the viewer will start at the upper left and the eye will naturally flow down to terminate at the bottom right. For sites that are text or image heavy, like Amway's, the eye moves left to right and then down, as if they are reading text on a page. Amway's pattern brings together all of the parts of a great e-commerce website, so readers will spend more time on the site, making the probability of purchases greater.
