Design a Brilliant Clothing Website
You’ve finally made it – your clothing line is in production, and you’ve even had customers that weren’t family members. Now, you’re going online with your store, and you want to really make a splash. Here is how to design a brilliant clothing website.
Graphic Design
Clothing design and web design are quite similar in many ways. Color combinations are crucial, and in web design they can make the difference in whether or not your customers can read your content. The presence of geometrics and shape are also important. Layering of pictures, text, video, and other elements on your web page can make it interesting or cross the line and be difficult to navigate.
Don’t feel like you have to design the site yourself. You wouldn’t want your web designer making your clothes, would you? So let the experts do what they do, and put your website together. You, of course, have creative input, and a good designer can take the colors you want and create an easily navigable site for your customers.
Catalog
Your catalog should also be easy to navigate. Besides the website tabs, such as “home”, “about us”, “order”, and “catalog” tabs, you should have an index on the sidebar or in the footer. This way, people can simply click on “winter clothes” or “skirts” and go straight to that catalog page.
Each item on the catalog page should take the potential customer to a more detailed closeup of that item with more information. If it doesn’t, the information should be on the catalog page. Below or beside that, there should be a button that will place the item in your shopping cart.
Studies have shown that when you provide a 3D button for navigation, clients are more likely to click. In addition, if you say something like, “Order now, with our secure server”, you’ll have a much higher conversion rate.
Once the shopper is at the shopping cart page, make sure that they can return to their shopping, preferably where they left off. This will encourage them to purchase more, if shopping is more convenient.
Models
Whether you use models or mannequins for your clothing line, try to make the pictures as artistic as possible. If you need to hire a professional photographer for this, it is well worth the investment. You’ve probably seen the websites where the designer simply changed the color on the Photoshop program, regardless of the background color. You can’t even see some of the clothes against the same color background.
If you can’t find professional models, or can’t afford them, then consider other sources. One popular regional clothing designer got her child’s 3rd grade classmates to model her children’s line of clothing. It was a very successful product launch.
Keep It Current
Just as you do a seasonal overhaul on your clothing line, you need to keep up with your website. Make sure all of the links work, and any time something is changed, verify it with the server so that there are no glitches.
Nina Edwards loves to write about fashion and clothing. She currently works for Fabric Clothing, a clothing shop that specializes in the best of men’s fashion.
