The right design for your jewelry website is the one that’s right for you. How do you know what’s right for you when there are so many different styles of jewelry website design out there? There are so many different ways you can design your site that it’s easy for someone to get so lost when designing their site that they may give up all together.
You have to remember that the choices are all yours, because it’s your site, and you have to decide what you like. Choices like which colors, styles, fonts, graphics, and writing styles to use are all very personal choices and not to be made lightly. What you say and do on your jewelry website says a lot about who you are. Here are some of the basics you need to consider when designing your site.
The Required Basics in Your Jewelry Website Design
With site objectives and site functions determined, it’s time to get down to design. This is where we begin to plan what the site will actually look like – the overall jewelry website design, how content will be arranged, and how to navigate through the sections.
There are ten main areas of design to consider:
Let a Professional Assess Your Current Site and Discuss Your Needs
If you are like most in the Jewelry Industry, you have a good sense of what you want on your website and what you want to do with it. But how much of this was based upon your “gut instincts” and not really based upon professional advice?
You can have the greatest looking website in the world but is your website directly helping your company increase its bottom line? Is your website being used for the right purposes?
After you paid one jewelry website design to build your site, besides listening to other people’s opinions, have you ever had another professional web design firm assess your website and discuss whether your company’s needs are being well served by your website?
Contact The Dillon Ross Group, let them know what your company does and what you want out of your jewelry website, and let them tell you whether your website is doing all that it can for you. The chances are that they will give you some great advice that your original designer may not have given you.
Number of Sections / Pages
Even if you aren’t designing the actual site yourself, take an hour or two and sit down with a pad of paper and think through the organization of your site.
Think about the information you want to be included on your jewelry site and how it can be best organized so visitors can find it. Create sections that logically group similar information.
Some examples of site sections might be:
- Products (with a grouping of types of products).
- Contact Us (About us, map, phone/email, newsletter signup, and key staff).
- Support (FAQ’s, Forum, Downloads).
- Blogs, Media (video, photo galleries).
- Your Account (shopping cart, previous order history).
Site Navigation
Great content poorly arranged is of little value. Some visitors may patiently sift and sort, but most will abandon your jewelry site for another that is easier to use. A consistent navigation toolbar is key if you want your information and products to be found and subsequently purchased.
Typically, the logo on the top of each page is a link to the home page. This way, visitors can escape what might feel like a dead-end by getting back to your home page. Ideally, your site will have a consistently placed navigation toolbar, allowing visitors to quickly move from one section to another without feeling like they’ve fallen into a deep well.
Does the layout, and more specifically, the navigation bar allow for easy browsing? If not, visitors may get frustrated and leave.
Colors and Graphics
These play a significant role in the overall feel and success of your jewelry website design. Both colors and graphics can communicate more than what you say on your site. Graphics enable you to promote products, show your products in use, and build trust.
In choosing colors and the overall appearance, you need to consider your type of business. If you are a jewelry website, it’s important that your site project seriousness, staying away from bright and loud colors combined with the playful fonts of a kid’s toy store. A great jewelry website design shows the world who you are and makes clients remember you. It helps potential shoppers understand if they found what they are looking for.
Your existing brand should also be considered. If you are expanding your existing business to an online business, it’s critical that the same feel and appearance be projected online. Clients will be confused and may even think that the website belongs to another company if you don’t carry the same feel and appearance as your physical store. By carrying the trust you’ve built in person to the web, you’ll convert in-store clients into your first online customers.
Questions to consider: Will the jewelry website design instill trust in visitors and encourage purchases? And is the website consistent in appearance with my other marketing materials?
Use Awesome Photos and Images
As they say, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” but if your pictures are bad, they will detract from your design. The decision to use photographs or photo-realistic images is up to you and your design, but the images must be as good as you can get. Amateur photographs and illustrations are a sure sign of a low-quality website.
This is another place where most beginning web designers, including myself, are tempted to use their own photos and illustrations, but unless you’re a professional photographer or illustrator, this is a bad idea. Luckily there are lots of great sources for cheap and free photos and images.
Mobile First—Use Responsive Web Design
This is a bit trickier than updating your logo, but it can really improve your jewelry website design for your customers. If you haven’t lately, you should look at your website on a mobile phone. You might be very surprised at how it looks. Many web designers leave out even the most basic of responsive elements: the META viewport tag. When you leave this out, you run the risk that your beautifully designed web page will look like ants walking across the screen on a mobile phone.
But even if you regularly use this meta tag, your pages can be difficult to read on mobile devices unless you use media queries and RWD to set design elements to look better on smaller screens.
Engagement
It is one thing to make a jewelry website design that looks good and works well; it is entirely another to come up with a website that engages the customer. There is no doubt that a website that engages a customer is more likely to score a sale.
Some of the issues to keep in mind about engagement on an e-commerce website are:
- User interaction: this could be the ability or ease of leaving feedback or a review.
- Visual elements such as images or videos that enrich the experience.
- Relevant, up to date information that answers the question in the customer’s mind and does not require them to go around in circles.
- Customization: by analyzing the customer’s behavior, or clickstream, you can customize the experience of visitors.
Product Description
Successful advertisers have known the secret forever — compelling copy makes the sale.
Make sure that your product description informs as well as persuades the customer. All along, make sure that you follow the basic principles of SEO copywriting.
Get and Use a Professional Logo
Your website logo is one of the first things people see, so getting the best logo you can get is not just important; it’s critical. It may be tempting to build your own logo—I admit, when I first got started, I made my own logo with basically no knowledge of graphic design. It’s so much cheaper to do it yourself, so I understand the impulse.
But every site I’ve managed since then that has had a professional graphic designer create the logo has done much better than my original attempts at logo design. And before you panic, getting a logo built doesn’t have to cost an arm and a leg.
Site functions
Elements such as social networks, blogs, forums, and online demos help create a jewelry website that will be visited, referred, and returned to.
Before beginning to design your site, it’s valuable to spend some time online to review some of your favorite sites and sites in the jewelry industry, including competitors, suppliers, and trade associations. Once you have a feel for what works well and what you dislike in these sites, you’ll be better prepared to create your jewelry website design.
Required Basics in Site Design:
- Quick loading pages: patience is uncommon online, so you better load it or lose ’em.
- Ease of Navigation: a sensible and consistent toolbar is a crucial piece of your website. A “home” link should also be on each page. Visitors hate getting lost on a website.
- Working links and images: Not only does it take away from your message, but broken links and poor images also reduce your credibility, and you’ll lose both visitors and sales.
- Means of contact: either a form or an email link. A map to your physical location, mailing address, and phone number should be clearly posted.
- Site map: help visitors navigate your site so they can find what they are looking for. By providing a good site map, you’ll keep more visitors on your site for longer and generate more transactions.
Follow these considerations, and you’ll be well on your way to having a successful online business.