What should you consider when choosing a template and design for your Shopify store? Oren, Business Development Manager at BOA Ideas, has a few tips for you.
The look and layout of your Shopify store directly affect not only the customer experience (and consequently sales volume), but also site loading speeds and the costs involved in building and running the store. Before you start comparing quotes from designers, it’s worth understanding exactly what you’ll need from them.
Dressing your business
The first question to ask yourself as a Shopify store owner is what you want from the design you choose. Of course, it’s your business’s outfit, and you’ll want to showcase your products and content in your own unique way. But does that necessarily mean having a custom-designed suit tailored “from scratch”? Not at all.
The Shopify Theme Store offers templates (also known as themes) organized by categories such as popularity and release date, as well as catalog size and base price. You’ll likely find an affordable (or even free) theme in the store that you can adapt to your Shopify store’s needs and upgrade as your business grows. But how do you choose the right theme?
What to look for when choosing a Shopify theme
- As you browse the options available in the Theme Store, be sure to consider a few things:
- The design and layout of the homepage
- The design and layout of the product pages in the catalog
Which features does the theme include, and do they meet your needs? For example: a mega menu, color swatches on category pages, a cart progress bar showing how many more items are needed to qualify for free shipping, and so on. These features affect the customer experience and encourage purchases. It’s important to consider the capabilities you may need in the future, too, and choose a theme that supports them.
There’s no need to focus too much on the category a theme is listed under. Shopify has organized themes into categories based on how popular they are for different types of stores and products, but that doesn’t mean, for example, that you won’t find the perfect theme for your clothing store in the jewelry or toys category.
The cost of customization: designing a Shopify store from scratch
If you choose to hire an external graphic designer for your Shopify store project and make significant structural changes compared with the designs already available in the Shopify Theme Store, it’s important to keep a few things in mind:
- The project will take longer to complete, to an extent that may not always be possible to predict in advance.
- More resources will be required to create a Shopify store from a new design for a live site—both from the graphic designer and from our development teams, who have to wait for the design and ensure it is implemented correctly for desktop and mobile versions.
Design or theme—which do you really need?
It’s important to understand the difference between customizing a theme to suit your store’s needs and building a completely different layout and design from scratch, rather than using any of the thoroughly tested and proven themes available to buy or download for free from the Shopify Theme Store. While the first option requires relatively few resources and little time to implement, the second can make the store-building process more complex. Technically, a complex system with unique visual elements can negatively affect site loading times. As we know, a slow site harms not only the user experience but also the site’s ranking in search engines such as Google.
Another very important thing to remember about the relationship between user experience and website design is that a beautiful design doesn’t necessarily mean a positive user experience that drives sales. So even if you want to make sure your site looks distinctive and different from every other site, remember that user experience is more important than the site’s appearance when it comes to building customer loyalty and increasing purchases.
Beyond the storefront window
In conclusion, designing your Shopify store can be compared to designing a physical store. Some people choose to match the wall and furniture colors to their brand colors and hire an experienced window dresser. Others look to build a store from the ground up, unlike anything that’s been built before, and need an architect, a contractor, custom-made furniture, unique rugs, and all of this before the store has earned a single shekel.
Want to learn more about BOA Ideas’ services and how we can help you build a distinctive, well-designed, user-friendly Shopify store? Get in touch—we’d be happy to tell you more.
