How to Conquer the Basics of Creating a Successful Website

30 Tips for Building Your First Business Website

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And to give those customers a reason to keep buying from your ecommerce website channel, and not from your Amazon channel where you lose out on brand equity and customer lifetime value. Amazon is best-in-class at convenience and price. CrazyEgg recently outlined exactly what it is about Amazon beyond price and convenience though convenience cuts through the entire Amazon experience that keeps customers the engaged. In a Digital Commerce study , consumer reported the following reasons for why they shop on branded websites over Amazon:.

If you want users to visit and buy from your site — where you can control the post-sale user experience, unlike on Amazon — you need a conversion driven design that makes your visitors feel like they are part of a community and can trust you. These sites have implemented the best design trends of to drive traffic and increase growth for their businesses. Sign up for our weekly newsletter. The best overall ecommerce website design is awarded to sites that succeed in creating a great user experience, branding consistency, mobile responsive and friendly UX, and quick checkout.

From quizzes to bundles and everything in between, New Chapter provides a personalized, choose-your-own-adventure experience for its customers and prospects. Conversion optimizations have increased from a launch state of approximately 0. Bliss has taken its fun, youthful and energizing in-spa and product feel to their online channel. Using bright colors, fun graphics and even gifs, the site encourages you to explore, engage and buy.

This site has a fresh, beautiful and engaging overall design. My favorite attribute is the color pallet and photography. From the layout to the color pallet and imagery, the design complements the brand promise that inner happiness leads to outward beauty. Bon Bon Bon is an artisan chocolate company based out of Detroit that is full of spirit and swagger. When looking to expand their brick-and-mortar presence online, Bon Bon Bon needed complete customization and flexibility to showcase their creativity and engage online consumers.

An original Shopify site failed to allow for necessary customizations and thus revenue goals. Brand Labs, working with Skidmore Studios in Detroit, created a funky, user friendly BigCommerce site that captures the spirit of the BonBonBon product, the Babes Babes Babes a rad group of ladies, keeping hand-u-facturing alive in Detroit , and of course the chocolate. This feature allows customers to select their favorite confections, add them to the corrugated cardboard box, and deliver them wherever they want.

The ability to create and design a website experience unique for their clientele is what keeps this fun-loving brand top of mind for chocolate aficionados. This is an energetic and personable site that does an excellent job of going beyond a template feel. Crossrope, founded by Dave Hunt, is on a mission to bring a fun, enjoyable jump rope experience to the masses. Aside from being the only interchangeable jump rope system on the market, they have a private fitness community of more than 75, jumpers worldwide.

This kind of workout phenomenon is more culture than simply product —— and the Crossrope website aims to tell that story throughout the site. The Mountain found initial success on Amazon but realized it would need a place where it could cultivate and engage with its audience online, and build brand equity. The Mountain does a great job providing customers an easy way to navigate their site, and provides a sense of urgency by including key coupon codes for certain customer segments. Because of this, we need specific tools to successfully execute our promotions.

With BigCommerce, we can easily create unique coupon codes, which we are using to instill urgency and drive our customers more quickly to the point of purchase. In 30 days after launch on BigCommerce, The Mountain saw a jump in conversions! Read more about their story. Make your retail site more flexible and innovative while also saving time, money, and launching your site faster. Some of the ecommerce sites below are brand new, online launches for the companies.

Other of these sites are net new launches after a tedious experience with former platforms. All of these brands launched on BigCommerce in the past 12 months — showcathsing the prowess of their design and UX in combination with complex ecommerce needs and functionality.

The design process and consideration of their audience was key to making a site that would stand out among the competition. Skullcandy pushes the limits in everything they do from their products, their music, corporate culture and with no exception, the BigCommerce platform for their digital ecommerce channel. A recent replatform effort launched in February. The design was also elevated to take advantage of more freedom within the BigCommerce platform.

Blending product with brand and brand with product, you gain a sense of the brand and quality of their products without effort. The Backstage Pass stories are an excellent content feature that is engaging without a hard sell. Excellent photography and product presentation. We worked with a development firm to build a custom theme that allowed us to have all of specific functionality features we were looking for.

Our in house design team developed the look and feel of the site based on the design aesthetics that we were using to re-launch our brand. Also, the blog posts are very well done and seem worth reading, which is rare for this kind of site!

Decibullz, with the help of design agency DigitalHaus, was able to take their website to the next level over the past year after switching to BigCommerce. As a manufacturer and brand, it is important that our website converts at a high rate as well as display education and information on our products and brand for possible resellers. Our new website uses a balance of lifestyle, product photography, and video to help educate our customers. One important factor when we switched was having a fast and reliable website while still being able to display large images and videos.

We have not only increased sales on our site, we have made it easier for our customers to find our products in-store at retail locations. I appreciated the data-driven metrics linked to the design, like the consistent two buttons on each page. And gives their merchandising, social and campaigns teams plenty to work with in terms of branded campaigns across channels. Layering as a category is clever, too.

The mega menus are good for a site with a lot of categories — and for good reason! Cruisemasters wanted to relaunch their brand and site with the goal of being more informative, rather than just showing a product with a price and add-to-cart. This site is quite complex, with a lot of moving parts and the customer wanted a much more information focussed product page. We also had a timeframe of only 5 weeks for completion. The product page is completely custom with multiple banners, captions and tabs but is able to be updated by the client using the Custom Fields section in BigCommerce.

JeepPeople is a brand for Jeep enthusiasts and their site was designed with their customers in mind. They are providing state of the art shopping features that help guide their customers through a personalized buying experience to ensure the parts they get fit with their Jeep. Designed and developed by Cart Designers, JeepPeople has moved from a broken shopping experience on the Shopify platform and increased their month over month conversion rate and sales revenue by This site showcases solid featured products and brands, making it easy to find the right fit for your Jeep.

Optimizely provides a list of elements a great homepage should include , such as:. The following brands have done a great job of implementing these and other conversion optimization tactics on their homepages. They allow users to browse by various categories or their top products quickly and easily on the homepage. I focused on having. This site showcases great use of bright product photos combined with lifestyle shots encourages visitors to explore and click around.

We used Stencil and partnered with a local Austin design Studio, Foda, to create a super simple, clean and modern site that exhibits the feel of the product and packaging.

This is such a clean design. They make nut milks and deliver them. Signal Boosters designed their homepage with its target audience in mind, aiming to answer their key questions as quickly as possible. We decided to redesign the website with the focus on business instead of consumer and service instead of products. The new site benefits from the new Stencil theme from BigCommerce which is more responsive than the old theme. The new design and development of SignalBoosters.

Of all the finalists in this category, this is the only one that really clearly and effectively communicates who they are and what they do. Physiq Apparel creates a homepage that guides visitors to the right shopping experience, and uses great lifestyle and product photography to convey its brand style. A smooth customer experience, review backed products, social media implementations and innovative features such as bundled products and free chocolate at the shopping cart. A lot of the work has involved building custom applications utilising the Bigcommerce API to achieve the functionality we want to offer our customers.

This site gets right into a product grid which is clean and makes it very obvious what I can do here: The customer experience includes the main ideas touched on earlier regarding non-amazon shoppers. This is important for store owners to consider because a unique, great customer experience is what will help keep yours visitors and customers coming back. There are several ways to improve the customers experience by using consumer data , and a few of our merchants have achieved this in some innovative ways. I believe that BigCommerce is allowing our site to grow into a landing page for children of all ages to have fun and feel creative!

Rusty Surfboards has a hard task: We created a consistent branding experience throughout the website, using the bigcommerce platform and have seen an upward trajectory on all fronts, but more importantly, on the sales front. They also enable their customers to discover various science projects they can do with their families and students.

After evaluating other mid-market ecommerce platforms and ways to reduce technical debt, Home Science Tools decided on a BigCommerce redesign. Groove created a responsive and engaging site to showcase product categories and content, and introduced custom elements like Shop by Age and Gift Selector to help users quickly navigate to products that meet their needs. Well organized categories make it easy to discover new projects and learn about different areas of science.

A beautiful homepage design is just the beginning. And a year later after learning them, Webpack started gaining ground, and I had to learn that too. As you can imagine, a big part of me was pretty disappointed with how quickly some of my knowledge became obsolete. But a coworker soon enlightened me by telling me something that changed how I viewed libraries and frameworks forever:. It also helped me understand how ReactJS gained so much popularity, as well as what kind of future awaited. I soon found out this was a winning combination with web development since things over here change really, really fast, with new frameworks and libraries constantly emerging.

This became critical to my process of becoming a better web developer. But in time I saw the light and finally understood:.

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Then you can move on. This can be hard at first, but thankfully great places like Stack Overflow, Medium and Reddit exist where you can find useful discussions between frameworks, and figure out which ones fit your specific use cases the best. In the upcoming years, I proceeded to continuously improve in the following ways. Reading that book series really opened my mind, and I also highly recommend it to anyone wanting to call themselves an expert JavaScript developer.

Once you got that out of the way, there are 2 extra resources I highly recommend to get an even further, more advanced JavaScript knowledge;.

The Results Are In: The 22 Best Ecommerce Website Designs of 2018

CSS can get messy and disorganized very, very quickly. There have been quite a few different methodologies proposed to write cleaner CSS, but 2 stand out which I highly recommend you read about ASAP to stay competitive:. A quick read through both articles should give you a solid foundation. By now you should have strong understanding of Grunt or Gulp. The next step is adding a JavaScript bundler to your task runner, which will allow for a more modular organization of your JavaScript application. Just be aware that webpack is the future, and what bigger projects are starting to use.

Getting Started and Concepts provides a solid overview of React. Once you got that out of the way, continue with Egghead. You can follow up with the official ReactJS documentation which is very well made and will allow you to fully master it. Redux does score a great balance between simplicity and being informative at getting started with Redux. I made a lot of mistakes in my 2 years of learning web development. Overall, I think my biggest mistake was not mastering the basics before moving on to libraries and frameworks.

I guess this applies to almost every programming language out there, but in my opinion it applies even more to JavaScript. This is because everyone loves to complain how their last place had one of the worst, ugliest code base in the world.

Design Tutorial: 5 Steps for a Successful Website Design

How their code ended up so clean and well made they were proud of it? Strive to make variable and function names understandable in English, even if you have to write a bit more. Not doing so will only lead to you having to manually document it sometime in the future to make it clearer. This will also cause your overall codebase to become harder to understand by new developers and yourself.

This is because in my experience, I found jQuery did me more harm than good at first. Some of you may not agree, but please let me explain: When I first learned it, the general idea I understood was that jQuery was everywhere and that you could use it for pretty much everything. Because of this, I got used to using jQuery for pretty much anything, and for any problem I encountered, I looked for a solution for it that used jQuery.

You may now be thinking: The problem was that my entire way of thinking and all the solutions to common problems I knew up until that point required jQuery to work. Using jQuery made me useless without it, and made me completely ignore the native methods and solutions that have always existed. It made all my solutions less portable too, since using them required jQuery. I spent a good 80— hours of training in Pluralsight, and I honestly want a good part of it back. I could have learnt so much more if I had taken courses from better sources like Egghead.

Overall, if you want to use Pluralsight, be sure that you are taking courses hand-picked by someone that took them first and that are recognized as high quality and useful. While true, I cannot stress enough the value paying for the right course has. Yes, there are terrible learning paid courses which I would advise against since their value proposition is questionable see Pluralsight , but others like Egghead. Plus, they all have free 7—15 day trials so you can see which one works best for you. If you play your cards right, paying 1—2 months of either of them can easily net you knowledge you would only otherwise get after stumbling upon countless of articles and blog posts over a year.

So yes, they are not necessary, but if you can afford at least one month, you can be sure it will give you a strong edge. These are in my opinion the secret sauce to being a successful web developer:.

Whew, this article took a while to finish 6 hours and counting. You may be wondering: I also added a few bonuses, which I would have loved to have had back then. As some of you already noticed, this is my first blog post, but you can be sure I plan to write more. I hope this was useful to you guys, until next time, Best! Sign in Get started. Home dev Learn to code for free.

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