The purpose of this blog is to illustrate in detail how to create a good shopping website especially the website that can maintain and attract customers.

A website is one of the tools that company or brand can sell their products, services, sharing its information such as the history, physical store location, latest news or price list etc., those are the fundamental things a website should have, however, if need to be a good shopping website, there are far more things need to be considered.

According to the Blue square management uploaded the video on Youtube about web design principles, valuable information, engagement and visitor conversion are the three principles to create a good website.

Regarding valuable information, valuable information should contain “who you are”, for example, what products does the brand selling. Information in simple keyword can definitely make home page clear and clean, and visitors can easily find out the content they want to look at. Moreover, the shopping website should encompass professional receptionist in live, and a live professional receptionist can help visitors to answer any question or specially request immediately without any further waiting, do not let visitor wait is a significant factor to maintain them. A detail contact page with email, phone number and social media account would give the visitor an opportunity to get in touch.

Engagement is about how does the brand make visitor land to its website. Every brand wants to keep visitor staying on their website for a long time instead of shutting it down in 5 seconds. Engagement such as visitor could control the website, play it, not the other way around. Adding more images or videos would be one of the attractive methods, Images or video clips can catch visitors more attention to the web.

Visitor conversion is the critical matter to the brands, and a good design website can actually convert visitors to customers. Optional opting in email pops up immediately when visitors land it in the homepage, the oping option could have it in every single page to remind visitor to sign up. That help to maintain the customer by receiving the brand’s latest email weekly, also can turn visitors who have not become customers when they first log in to the website into customers.

Furthermore, usability is quite important to the web. Usability is about how visitors can do on the website and how easy to use it. People can leave in any second if the website is getting them lost, also, “The first law of e-commerce is that if users cannot find the product, they cannot buy it either”(Nielsen, J., 2003).

In order to increase usability, websites should minimise the errors rate when visitors using the website. The errors such as payment error and information error, payment process need to check within a small period to prevent the error occur, information about products price need to be updated, An error defined as any action that does not accomplish the desired goal of the visitors (Jahn, M. and Frank, A.U., 2004).

However, there is a risk by those actions, especially Adding more images or video clips, that could increase the loading time on the page, Time taken has a huge impact on the interesting. There is an experiment that sums up the conclusion that long delays time produces greater frustration(Selvidge, P., 1999). Therefore, visitors would have a not fluently experiment and rather close the website if it takes too long to load the web entirely.

Those are how to make the website initiative work and how can make it better, besides with the risk of this initiative.

YouTube. (2019). Web Design Principles : What Makes a Good Website Design 2018. [online] Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RZ5GM2uYeLA [Accessed 1 Mar. 2019].

Nielsen, J., 2003. Usability 101: Introduction to usability.

Jahn, M. and Frank, A.U., 2004. How to increase usability of spatial data by finding a link between user and data. na.

Selvidge, P., 1999. How long is too long to wait for a website to load. Usability news, 1(2), pp.1-3.

In this blog, I will be looking at a sportswear and streetwear brand’s website called Champion, this website is not only allowed customers to buy Champion clothing online instead of going out to the physical store but also has the latest information about the Champion such as new season collection. The roles of the website are transactional and brand building.

The website is targeting the customers mainly in Europe, it because the shipping countries are only UK, Italy, Belgium, Germany, Denmark, Sweden, France, Ireland, Spain and the Netherlands.  Furthermore, the champion itself is a kind of streetwear brand, therefore the most important targets definitely are the people who love streetwear fashion, targeting age in between 15-30, unisex and the lifestyle would be people play skateboarding often.

To compare with another brand’s websites, Stussy and Thrasher. Champion is more effective than these two.

1. The home page of Thrasher website is a bit messy, lots of information in the landed page but is kind of disorder.
2. The Thrasher website focus on the sharing skateboarding video, news, there is none of the information about the Thrasher streetwear.
3. Stussy website’s style is similar to Champion’s. but Champion would be more clear. For example, when we land to the home page, all kinds of clothing names are written on the photos. Stussy do have photos on the home page, but the name of clothing will be showing when we use mouse point it on the photo, some customers would not be very clear what this section of photo trying to sell.
4. The customer can easily change the currencies based on what countries they are living in on Champion and Stussy’s website, but not in Thrasher’s website

Here is the YouTube video shows that 8 Best Practices for Website Design that Sells, (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NdHqq5Yliys ) , I would suggest that the most important is the first rule, the 10 second rule, It describe that when customer landed to the home page, they are not making a will I buy decision, they are making will I stay or will I go decisions.  The images show that model wearing the sportswear on the Champion’s home page would definitely attract customer attention to stay in the website.

In 2017, a marketing growth strategist Adam Erhart said that the first impression is very important, the best way to get a good first impression from customers is the website design keep it clean, simple and giving positivity reflects. I would say that the design of the champion website perfectly matches the words simple and clean. Customers can easily understand and control by the obvious navigation.

Regarding the touch point of the customer journey map, there is two important point I would need to point it out.

1. The first one is if the customer successfully purchased in the website, the website processes fluently step by step, it would provide a good experience to the customer. That is why I put the smiling face in the touch point.
2. The second one is if a customer wants to buy a product out of stock, the brand would probably lose this customer, that why I put the down fact in the touch points. But, if the website providing a customer online services to guide the customer where he or she can buy it in store. This kind of services could enhance the second impression of the brand.

ALL the personas and journey map will show on here

Reference

Erhart, A. (2017). Web Design Tips | The Top 8 Elements to an Effective Website – Adam Erhart. [online] Adam Erhart. Available at: https://adamerhart.com/web-design-tips-top-7-elements-effective-website/ [Accessed 13 Dec. 2018].