So you’re getting ready for the holidays; as an online retailer, this means a lot more than a newspaper ad and some tinsel in the windows. Cyber Monday is just around the corner, and that means getting your site skinned out and ready to go as quickly as possible. You need your storefront to offer form and function, and particularly during this season that means more work and more time than you have to offer.
Or does it? Depending on where you start, it can be as easy as a few clicks to get a new design up and running. Online retail solutions offer users access to hundreds or thousands of pre-optimized templates to get up and running fast without sacrificing style or user experience. If you’ve been online for a long time, you know that “template” used to be a dirty word in the world of web design-but not anymore. Now rookies and expert web designers alike have embraced templates as a great way to get started in a hurry, for a few simple reasons.
More Options
Cyber Monday sales are on the rise, with 2013’s figures rising to $2.29 billion according to Adobe’s Digital Index. This means it’s more important than ever to offer a shopping experience that customers will enjoy, and that means getting the best bang for your buck in the design department.
Unless you’re a pro web designer, you don’t want to be limited by your own CSS and HTML knowhow; eCommerce sites have special needs not commonly seen in other web design jobs. This means that, unless you’ve already got experience, you’ll spend more time bug checking than you will making sales on Cyber Monday. If you decide to get a custom theme made by a professional web designer, you could end up spending thousands of dollars for a final product that isn’t ready in time for the big day.
Using a template, however, eliminates both of these issues entirely. Templates give you access to thousands of themes designed specifically for your industry, and if they don’t come with lights and tinsel already hung up, they’re easy to decorate for the holidays. In a few simple clicks you could have a professionally designed storefront fully prepared for Cyber Monday and the holiday season beyond, and you’re not limited to a few mockups and one final design.
Ease of Use
Not only do templates provide industry-proven design features, making your store easier for your customers to navigate and more attractive to everyone, they’re easier for people working on the other side of the Internet too—namely, you. Starting with a template means that the redesign is easy to put up at the start of the holiday season, and just as easy to take back down after this year comes to a close. Don’t worry about sweeping up any digital bristles or coiling up the lights so they won’t tangle, just swap your other theme or skin back in with a few simple clicks.
Likewise, if you find that the first template you chose just doesn’t work for you after all, it’s easy to find another that will more readily suit your needs without wasting a lot of time. This makes it infinitely easier and faster to get ready for the biggest shopping weekend of the year.
Responsiveness Comes Standard
The vast majority of templates are designed to be optimized for mobile from first click. Mercury News reports that consumers could do up to 30 percent of their holiday shopping online, making mobile optimization not just a feature, but a necessity. Responsive templates provide true optimization, making your site scale and reshuffle itself with every mobile resolution there is, from the oldest Blackberry device to the new iPhone 6 “phablet”.
By being responsive instead of working with a “mobile version” of your site, you cut your work in half. Stop worrying about putting up different, redesigned core pages for your mobile customers, installing plugins to make your product pages work at smaller resolutions, and searching for services to let you preview your storefront at different resolutions and with different operation systems. Choosing a template that is responsive for both mobile and super-sized resolutions assures that your storefront looks its best to every customers who browses in.
Get Started Now
Yahoo Small Business reports that this year, consumers expect to do as much as 44 percent of their holiday shopping online; with retail revenue from the entire holiday shopping season reaching $95 billion in 2013, you can’t afford for your storefront to be anything but the best it possibly can. Stop worrying about redesigning your site for the holidays all on your own, or paying out the nose for something completely custom. Rely on industry-proven, professionally designed eCommerce templates to show your store’s best side with ease.