Effective Web Design

Mon, Jul 19, 2010

Uncategorized

I am surprised I haven’t written about web design in the past since it’s what I have been doing the past two years at double dragon studios. There are a lot of things to think about when it comes to making an effect web design for your clothing company. One of the most important aspects is web usability.

Web usability is an approach to make web sites easy to use for an end-user, without requiring her (or him) to undergo any specialized training.[citation needed] The user should be able to intuitively relate the actions he needs to perform on the web page, with other interactions he sees in the general domain of life e.g. press of a button leads to some action. The broad goal of usability can be:[citation needed]

  1. Present the information to the user in a clear and concise way.
  2. To give the correct choices to the users, in a very obvious way.
  3. To remove any ambiguity regarding the consequences of an action e.g. clicking on delete/remove/purchase.
  4. Put the most important thing in the right place on a web page or a web application.

In short communicate what your company is all about within the first couple seconds of a user visiting your site then make the site simple and intuitive so anyone can use it.

A great book on web usability is Don’t Make Me Think: A Common Sense Approach to Web Usability, 2nd Edition Effective Web Design. I’ll try and go further in depth in posts later about how to communicate what your company is all about and how to improve your websites usability.

SEO (search engine optimization) is another thing that you need to think of when designing a web site. I use wordpress to run the blog or clothing companies and any pages like about, faq. WordPress has great plugins for SEO and you can tweak your SEO as much as you want. If SEO is something that you don’t understand use the search in the upper right of the site and you can find some good articles on the subject.

I have been using bigcartel to do the stores and cart but it doesn’t give you a lot of options for the individual pages SEO. You can basically just change the meta tags on the layout and it goes on all the pages. The names of thumbnail images aren’t descriptive and you can’t change the url of any items after you create the product. It leaves a lot to be desired.

I have started to use magento which gives you tons of SEO options and other plugins and it has everything you want. It takes more time to develop and you need to get a better host to run it since it uses a lot of resources but it is one of the better carts out there and probably has the most features of an of the free carts right now.

CMS, or content management system is a must. I still have friends I knew from college making static websites or all flash sites and it just makes updating anything a pain in the ass. You will need to have a webmaster update everything which can get expensive. WordPress, big cartel, and magento all are great CMS’s and you’ll be able to update everything with no knowledge of coding. Unless a client needs a new design I don’t do any updates on a site.

Social bookmarking and user coments are also important.

Facebook has come out with http://developers.facebook.com/docs/reference/plugins/comments you just insert the code into your site and people can easily leave comments on your products. the beauty of it is you just need a facebook account to make a comment, it’s super easy.

I also have a social bookmarking plugin I use on wordpress. You can check it out below you can easily share my posts with the click of the button.

On my e-commerce product page I use this thing called add this. http://www.addthis.com/ I use a custom icon set which you can check out on the site I made http://heartsofkings.bigcartel.com/product/the-king-logo

So that’s what I’ve got off the top of my head. Put up some comments or questions and I’ll do my best to answer them.

threadsnotdead Effective Web Design

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Thanks,
Jon Kruse

This post was written by:

- who has written 135 posts on How to start a Clothing Company.

Besides running this blog I also own two clothing companies, Mediocore Clothing and SHRED. I also run Double Dragon Studios with a partner and we do a lot of work for clothing companies making stores, blogs, and myspace layouts. Please send me an email if you have any questions, want to hire me for work, or just want to say thanks.

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  • Tara

    hey. AWESOME POST and perfect time because it directly relates to what we are currently working on with my company.

    QUESTION: How do we put wordpress into my site rather then create a wordpress site? We have really been struggling with this.

    Any help is MUCH apprieciated!

  • jonkruse

    There is no quick way to do it. You just design both the wordpress and store exactly the same and make sure everything lines up. It's more work but it's worth it.

  • Bruccibass

    Hey Jon Kruse,
    I have a Question for these CMS's. I was going to use godaddys ecommerce instead of bigcartel. The problem is, I dont want my website to look unproffesional. I dont want to spend tens of thousands on web designers either. But somewhere half way I guess. I just dont want my website to have a logo saying “bigcartel” or “godaddy” on the site, it cheapens it and makes it look like a small company run out of a home. Please advise bruccibass@hotmail.com Btw thanks for all the information you share with all of us!

  • jonkruse

    I would not recommend godaddy. Bigcartel has really good setup, very basic but it works and you can look professional for $10 a month. I'll send you an email from my design company double dragon studios.

  • Insurrealclothing

    Hey Jon, i have recently started up a business called Insurreal Clothing. With little experience, and not many connections, i have a few questions. I may bee in over my head, but i figured ill give it a shot. i have my designs finished and already have a friend who is willing to print them, i just need to figure out how to addd more umph to it. i was wondering if you could help with setting up the actual site, banners, links, etc. All help is appreciated. Thanks

  • jonkruse

    you can contact me on http://www.doubledragonstudios.com

  • Jeff

    Hey, just started reading this blog as I am in the process of beginning my own line. Just an fyi, the resources and posts on this site are nothing short of amazing, huge help. I work professionally as a web developer, and I actually work for an ecommerce company, I feel like I can add some input here.

    The SEO plugins via WordPress or Magento are more or less going to be bullshit. A lot of people don't realize that SEO is not going to be helped by third party add-ons. The best thing you can do is optimize the shit out of your site with the content that is presented. KEYWORDS on the page are probably the biggest thing to help SEO. Putting your company name, type of clothing and demographic into something as simple as a welcome paragraph will help much more than adding meta tags or alt tags on links. Having SEO on product pages is useless, ultimately you want them on the store, but getting them to the site is just as important. You want people to be familiar with the brand, and with what you are trying to do. If they like that they will continue to the store. SEO on the product pages could get people straight there if they searched for that, but chances are they will not, especially if you are starting out (how will they know what to search for?). As far as CMS, those can be extremely helpful, but in a small business are not really necessary. I mean, how many pages could you possibly have? And how many of those are going to need constant updates. The update time is minimal. On top of that, code generated by the CMS' text editor may not be the best. You could end up with multiple tags that you should only have one of, which will only hurt your rankings. The stuff that needs constant updating is going to be on the actual store, and that will all be handled however the store does it.

    I think I may be a little long winded here, so I will stop.

    One last thing, just to reiterate Jon's comment in the post…
    DO NOT EVER USE FLASH FOR YOUR SITE! That will kill ALL rankings.

    Also, kill the music on your site, no one likes that shit.

    Thanks

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