Road to launch: Designing the store
Tony Sarno20 February 2007, 8:53 PM
Getting the right look and feel for your store is critical. This is how we designed Geek Gear,
Most shopping carts provide templates for product display and look and feel. We decided to create our own look and feel to work with the basic product display templates provided by the NetMerchant solution. Of course, APC has its own art director and designer – but here we're acting as an ordinary business wanting to create its own store. To capture the real costs, we approached an external web designer to design the store.
The Brisbane- based design studio, Avalde, first created a holding page for Geekgear.com.au which was up until the rest of the site had been built. This proved to be a good move, since we had over 500 visitors in just 4 weeks with close to 20% registering to be notified when the site was launched.
After several iterations with the designer we called in Luke Amery and the team from NetMerchant to look over the concepts to ensure they could support the necessary eCommerce functionality. With all parties agreeing about the general form and function of the site the finer elements such as how detailed product pages looked were then developed.
Two weeks later, Avalde presented us with Adobe Photoshop files which NetMerchant sliced into html and turned into a functional e-commerce solution. It was important that we supported as many browsers as possible (if not we’d just be turning customers away), so NetMerchant ensured the final site used standards compliant mark-up. The bespoke design cost us $6,000. Again, design is a cost you can forgo entirely if you just use the templates that come with many shopping cart solutions.
Amery makes the point that good design is critical for an online retail store: “It’s important because it helps establish a level of trust that’s hard to achieve any other way.”
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