Creating a good looking and decorating your web Store

An important thing you should know before starting your ecommerce store is about web 2.0. If you haven’t heard about Web 2.0, look it up in Wikipedia right now. This is the age of web 2.0. If you have been following the trend of successful websites in recent times, then you will probably know about the importance of it. Web 2.0 basically involves merging visual elements like video, audio & pictures into a webpage instead of just a plain old webpage with text.

In recent times, websites that have been using exactly the same kind of features on their web pages have been succeeding online. Therefore, it is very critical to make your online store have these features in it too in order for it to succeed. (I know that I have been saying the exact same thing in my previous posts but I hope that you do understand how important it is).

So, you have a couple of choices to make in order to do this part of it effectively. Both choices have the same end result. But the time taken to accomplish the same is different for both of them. You have to understand that it is a tradeoff between money & time. I am sure you must have encountered this dilemma before. It is similar to the situation wherein you are trying to decide whether to have dinner at a restaurant or cook food on your own in your house. It is the perfect example for a classic tradeoff between money & time.

By going to the restaurant, you are saving time but you will have to spend money on it. But if you choose to cook your own food in your house, instead, you are saving a lot of money, but you are wasting time in preparing the food.

So, back from restaurants & food, here is what you may choose to do:

a) Choose one of the websites that is listed in the homepage of this blog to host your online store on.
OR
b) Buy your own domain for a lesser price but dress it up on your own.

Now, I hope you understood what I was talking about when I was telling you about how the two choices were a tradeoff between time and money. By choosing option a) you are spending less time creating & designing the website & more time researching the traffic or marketing it. By choosing option b) you are spending more time on designing you online store to your liking for lesser money considering that you bought your domain off a cheap hosting service.

Also remember that option b) need not always be the worse choice of the two, but I would definitely recommend it. I personally know many people in the same online store business who have designed their own websites & still made it look very good. But if you, like me, are not so enthusiastic about art & web designing, and just like to get along with life by paying some money, then option b) would be a much better choice for you.

If you choose option a) also, there are many advantages. You can choose between many different varieties of templates & choose one that you best like. Once you have done that, you can modify the colors & whatever else you think and you will have a good looking online store. This is as good as if you decide to host your own domain. This is one thing that I really like about these websites. You don’t have to stick to just one theme. You can modify it to your liking.

If you do in fact, want to do it on your own, then do a Google search for “templates”. You will see a list of many websites offering free web templates. Choose the template that you like the best & one that you think will look not only good, but also relevant to your store. I personally prefer to use this website called http://www.templatemonster.com. It has many many templates that you can choose from. If you don’t want to pay, you will find many other similar websites offering web templates for free. Go ahead & check them out.

You must also be careful with what kind of colors you use. For example, it would be an appropriate for the website of a metal band to have their homepage filled with a lot of black color. This is because black is totally related & relevant to the website of a metal band. However, the same black color when used in the homepage of an online store selling spiritual books will not be appropriate. You know what I mean, right? It is important that you do.

As I said in one of my previous posts, keep the template that you choose for the homepage of your online store as simple as possible. Just put up a couple of links that lead to other places on your website where you create landing pages which sell some of the products that you decide to sell.

Also, it would be good idea to use the same template for all the pages inside your website. Unless, you think that there is some sort of a correlation between them, having different templates for each page inside the website is not recommended by most of the Internet marketing experts who have done some research on the psychological thinking of customers when they are about to buy something.