Articles

It’s fun to see new website design tools that reflect current times and the state of the world. That’s very true this month with new databases devoted to diversity and women in technology, as well and resources to make your design life easier.

Here’s what’s new for designers and developers this month:

Ztext.js

Ztext.js is an easy to implement, three-dimensional typography tool for the web that works with any font you want to use. With the popularity of 3D effects and animation, this tool has a lot of practical applications. Everything you need, including documentation, is available from developer Bennett Feely on his website and GitHub. (It’s free but you can show appreciation with a donation if you like it.)

Gradient Magic

Gradient Magic is a free gallery of fun and interesting CSS gradients. You can sort through a random selection or by category of color to find just the right gradient for your project. Some of them would make really neat backgrounds or image overlays.

Impossible Checkbox

Impossible Checkbox is a fun little divot that you’ll want to play with and emulate. Click or tap the slider to activate and a nifty little friend pops up. Now here’s the fun part: You can’t leave it checked, and take note of the changing expression of the checkbox character.

Diversify Tech

Diversify Tech isn’t your average job board; it is a collection of resources – and opportunities – for underrepresented people in technology. It includes a weekly roundup and everything from scholarships, to events, to jobs, to speaking opportunities.

Women in Tech

Women in Tech is a list of apps made by women. The apps are ranked and chosen based on upvotes and is a good resource if you want to help support women-owned projects. Search or submit an app for inclusion.

Devello Studio

Devello Studio is a tool that allows you to write code in the cloud. You don’t have to install anything and no matter where you are, just can open a project in-browser, and continue development where you had left off last time. Plus, it works with GitHub support built right in.

Hustl

Hustl is a premium Mac app that allows you to create time-lapse videos of your screen. Use it to show off work or projects or create a cool video for your portfolio. Plus you can use it to capture just one active app so you don’t have to do a lot of editing later.

FeedBaxley

FeedBaxley is a user feedback tool that helps you (and users) figure out what’s frustrating before it becomes a real issue. You can customize everything to match your brand and set it up with copy and paste tools. Feedback integrates with Slack, making it easy for you to analyze information with a team.

BestTime

BestTime launched a major update with a new tool that makes it possible to analyze visitor peaks of public business (cafe, gym, etc) for whole areas. Using the heatmap API you can find businesses at popular times, locations, or by business type.

Pixeltrue

Pixeltrue is a new collection of free SVG illustrations and Lottie animations in a trendy style. They are available for commercial and personal use and add a bit of whimsical delight to website projects. (The error illustrations are particularly fun.)

Previewed

Previewed has tons of cool and realistic mockups that you can use to create the perfect setting for digital projects. You can find mockups for a variety of devices and cool panoramas that work perfectly for elements such as app store previews.

Alt Text Overlay Bookmarklet

The Alt Text Overlay Bookmarklet solves a common problem: It shows what images use alt text and what that text is. The tool was created by Christian Heilmann and he’s put it on GitHub for you to play with and test.

MergeURL

MergeURL allows you to merge and shorten up to five links. Enter the links and mergeurl.com/o/xxxxx, for example, will open all the URLs associated with that link. The tool is free to use and you don’t have to register to use the service.

Infinity Search

Infinity Search is a new search engine that lets you look for things privately and efficiently. Search the web, images, or videos. Here’s a little about how it works: “While we retrieve results from other search engines like Bing and Wikipedia, we also have our own indexes of links that are displayed in our search results. We are actively working on improving these indexes and they will only get better.”

Blade UI Kit

Blade UI Kit is a set of renderless components to use in Laravel Blade Views. It’s built for the tall stack and is completely open source. It includes 26 components and you can contribute as well.

Trusted News

Trusted News is a Google Chrome extension that uses AI to assist in evaluating the quality of the online content. In its first release, it scores the objectivity for a selected article, testing whether it is written from a neutral perspective as opposed to a subjective one.

BaseDash

BaseDash allows you to edit production data without coding. You can make changes to the database with the ease of a spreadsheet. This tool makes it easy to find and edit information in a hurry. It works with all major databases including MySQL, PostgreSQL, Amazon Redshirt, Microsoft SQL Server, and more.

Email2Go

Email2Go is a service that helps you create email templates and test them on dozens of physical devices and applications. It’s free right now while it is in early release.

Iconscout Converter

The Iconscout Converter allows you to convert icons and images from one file format to another for free. Convert SVG, PNG, JPG, and PDF with a single click.

Shape 2

Shape 2 is a massive collection of 5,000+ unique icons and illustrations with a full-blown web editor. Customize colors, stroke width, size and full variations that can export to SVG, PDF, PNG, GIF, and React. This is a premium tool and includes a discounted release price for now.

Aestetico

Aestetico is a beautiful sans serif that includes a massive family with 54 styles. This premium typeface is highly readable and has modern lines and curves that make it a great option for a variety of uses.

Arcades

Arcades is a modern display font with a retro, 1980s-style vibe. It includes regular and italic styles.

Brimington

Brimington is a handwriting style typeface with rough strokes and smooth curves. It includes a set of 227 characters and 219 glyphs in a readable design.

California Signature

California Signature is a typeface duo with a slab serif and handwriting style that are perfectly paired. The thick and thin options provide a yin and yang effect.

Eastblue

Eastblue is a script typeface with long swashes and interesting curves. It includes a solid character set and is free for personal use only.

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Agile 

AI

Big Data

Cloud

Database

DevOps

Integration

  • Mulesoft 4: Continuous Delivery/Deployment With Maven by Ashok S — This article is a great example of what we want every tutorial to look like on DZone. The main aim of this article is to provide a standard mechanism to release project artifacts and deploy to Anypoint Platform, from the local machine or configure in continuous delivery pipelines.
  • Integration With Social Media Platforms Series (Part 1) by Sravan Lingam — This article helps you to build a RESTful API through MuleSoft that integrates with LinkedIn and shares a post on behalf of one’s personal account. I like this article because, in the age of social media, it’s so important for businesses to be connected and integrated!

IoT

Java

Microservices

Open Source

Performance

  • What Is Big O Notation? by Huyen Pham — Aside from a silly name, this article is an example of an in-depth analysis on a little-spoken-about concept. In this article, take a look at a short guide to get to know Big O Notation and its usages.
  • Is Python the Future of Programming? by Shormisthsa Chatterjee — Where is programming going? This article attempts to answer this question in a well-rounded way. The author writes, "Python will be the language of the future. Testers will have to upgrade their skills and learn these languages to tame the AI and ML tools".

Security

Web Dev

  • A Better Way to Learn Python by Manas Dash: There’s so many resources available for learning Python — so many that it’s difficult to find a good and flexible place to start. Check out Manas’ curated list of courses, articles, projects, etc. to get your Python journey started today. 
  • Discovering Rust by Joaquin Caro: I’m a sucker for good Rust content, as there’s still so many gaps in what’s available. Joaquin does a great job of giving readers his perspective of the language’s features in a way that traditional docs just 

Source de l’article sur DZONE

Every week users submit a lot of interesting stuff on our sister site Webdesigner News, highlighting great content from around the web that can be of interest to web designers.

The best way to keep track of all the great stories and news being posted is simply to check out the Webdesigner News site, however, in case you missed some here’s a quick and useful compilation of the most popular designer news that we curated from the past week.

How to Make Halftone Gradient in Photoshop

 

Drawing Simple Line Patterns Using HTML5 Canvas

 

10 Online Design Tools You Never Knew You Needed

 

4 Best Content Management Systems (CMS) for Marketing

 

9 Mistakes Designers Still Make

 

6 Visual Design Principles that UX Designers Should Be Aware of

 

Best Way to Lazy Load Images for Maximum Performance

 

17 Stunning Examples of Sites with Horizontal Scrolling

 

Less is a Bore. Why Tech is Finally Embracing Maximalism

 

What Does it Mean to Have a High-Quality Website in 2020?

 

8 Project Management Tips for your Next Web Development Project

 

MergeURL – Shorten Urls for Free Without User Registration

 

13 Design Challenges to Improve and Showcase your Skills

 

How to Find Web Design Clients

 

Waitlist API – Quick and Easy Waitlist with Built in Referral

 

What is the Small Web?

 

24 Beautifully Designed Pricing Page Examples

 

7 Practical Tips for Better Microcopy

 

15 Awesome Developer Home Workstations

 

Pentagram Designs “edgier” Visual Identity for Rolls-Royce

 

Gorgeous Gradients: A Curated Collection of Dreamy Color Transitions

 

Experts Weigh in on the Biden-Harris Logo

 

50+ Modern Fonts to Use on your WordPress Website in 2020

 

15 Florist Websites that will Inspire Every Flower Lover

 

Create your First React Native Android App

 

Want more? No problem! Keep track of top design news from around the web with Webdesigner News.

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

In this month’s collection of the freshest web designs from the last four weeks the dominant trend is attention to detail.

You’ll find plenty of animation, in fact, almost every one of these sites uses animation to a greater or lesser degree. Let’s dive in:

Globekit

Globekit is a tool that allows developers to quickly create animated and interactive globes and embed them on web pages. Its site features some exceptional 3D animation.

Yolélé

Yolélé is food company built around fonio, a West African super grain. Its site features a great page transition, and the landing page carousel is one of the few examples of horizontal scrolling we’ve seen work well.

Begonia

Begonia is a Taiwanese design agency with an impressive client list. Its site features animated typography, a super bold splash screen, and some surreal artwork. There’s so much here, it’s almost overwhelming.

Next Big Thing

Next Big Thing is an agency supporting the full lifecycle of start-ups. Its site is clearly targeting tech-based clients, and there are some lovely transitions. The masked hero transition on scroll is delightful.

Proper

We all have every reason for the odd sleepless night right now, but regular sleep is essential for our health. Proper offers sleep solutions from coaching to supplements on its subtly shaded site.

The Oyster & Fish House

The site for The Oyster & Fish House is packed with some delightful details. We love the subtle wave textures, the photography has a nostalgic feel, and the typography is perfectly sophisticated.

Drink Sustainably

Fat Tire produces America’s first certified carbon neutral beer, and Drink Sustainably has been produced to explain the concept. We love the vintage advertising style of the artwork.

Treaty

It seems like every week there’s a new CBD brand launching. What we like about Treaty’s site is the slick fullscreen video, the inclusion of botanical illustrations, and the really brave use of whitespace.

Studio Louise

You’re greeted on Studio Louise’s site by a shot of trees with two random shapes; as you scroll the shapes morph and relocate to the top right corner, and you suddenly realize they’re an “S” and an “L”, cue: smiles.

Wünder

Another site for a CBD product, this time a vibrantly branded sparkling beverage. Wünder’s site features enticing photography, an on-trend color palette, and credible typography.

Seal + Co

Some professions lend themselves to exciting, aspirational sites, and some companies are accountancy firms. However Seal + Co’s site creates the impression of a modern, capable, and imaginative firm.

DocSpo

There is some lovely, 3D animation on the DocSpo site. The company is a Swedish startup enabling digital business proposals, and its site is bold, Appleesque, and packed with nice details.

Motley

We never get tired of particle effects, like the one employed by Finland-based agency Motley. There’s some superb work in the portfolio, and it’s great to see a blog using Old Master paintings for thumbnails.

The Ornamental

The Ornamental sources leather goods for wealthy individuals, and luxury lifestyle firms. Its site is minimal, with some drool-worthy handbags. We particularly liked the image zoom hover effect in the store.

G.F Smith

G.F Smith is one of the world’s leading paper suppliers. Its redesigned site is much simpler than its last, with some lovely touches, like the varied paper photography when you hover over product thumbnails.

Raters

Raters is a new app that lets you discover new movies via reviews from people you trust. This simple site does an exceptional job of previewing the app, across multiple device sizes.

Fleava

There’s a whole heap of nice interactive details on Fleava’s site, from the cursor-following circles when hovering over links, to the way the thumbnails are squeezed when dragging through projects.

The Story of Babushka

A babushka doll is a traditional Russian toy, made up of dolls, nested inside dolls. The Story of Babushka uses the toy as a metaphor for growth in this children’s book, and the accompanying animated website.

Grand Matter

After the uniformity of the 2010s, there are a wealth of illustration styles being explored across the web. Grand Matter is an artist agency that represents some amazing talent, and we love the illustration they chose themselves.

Nathan Young

Nathan Young’s site does exactly what it needs to do: Providing case studies for his design work. The fade-out on scroll is a simple device that elevates the whole site experience.

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

The common theme in this month’s collection of new tools and resources is “things that help you show off your work.” Many of these tools are made to help you better web products or apps or showcase designs with others.

Here’s what new for designers this month.

Naturaltts

Naturaltts is an online text to speech converter, that allows you to download an mp3 recording. The tool has more than 60 voices to choose from in six languages. There’s a free plan for personal use (based on characters converted) and affordable paid plans for higher volumes and commercial users. One application of this tool is voiceover for videos or tutorials.

Handz

Handz is a library of hands with different gestures in three-dimensional shapes. The collection includes 12 gestures with nine skin colors, and three different sleeve types. Put all that together and you have 320 potential combinations that you can use for projects. The library is completely free and works in a variety of formats with different tools.

Isoflow

Isoflow allows you to create isometric diagrams for presentations and illustrations with ease. You can edit and then export diagrams for print or website use, thanks to vector rendering.

Device Shots

Device Shots is a small web app that helps you generate a high-resolution device mockup using a screenshot of your website or mobile application. It supports almost every device type you can think of and resizes for social media platforms.

Barchartrace

Barchartrace is a simple MIT open source bar chart generator. Use it to create some of the animated charts you see on social media. Just insert your information (upload via CSV file), choose animation settings, and go.

Zettlr Markdown Editor

Zettlr is a free and open source markdown editor for Mac OS. Zettlr supports simple notations, references, includes a dark mode, and tagging. It’s made for note takers who need a tool to amp up their projects, and is used primarily in higher education.

CSS Leaning Card Effect

The CSS Leaning Card Effect replicates the bookshelf feel you get when rectangles lean with a shadow against planes. Lynn Fisher does it in the pen with code that you can see and work on with your own images.

Lemon.io

Lemon.io is a tool that matches you with freelance developers to get projects moving more quickly. You are guaranteed a match in 24 hours and there is no risk if the match doesn’t work out. Just tell Lemon.io what you need and the algorithm will match you with a dev from the database. Prices for development through the platform start at $35 per hour.

Papercups

Papercups is a customer messaging tool that lets you chat in real-time. The customizable widget works with your favorite tools, such as Slack and Gmail, and is free to use. Chat apps are one of the most in-demand website features right now.

CSS Click to Animate Gif

Christian Heilmann has created a great guide/experiment in pure CSS that adds a play button on top of animated GIFs so that users can control the motion. He developed the concept because GIFs can get overwhelming and annoying. Learn how he did it and see it in action.

3D Book Image Generator

Here’s another little bit of CSS magic with a 3D Book Image Generator. Just input your image and set some specifications and get a 3D book cover image that you can use in projects. (There’s also an accompanying tutorial if you want to learn how to generate the CSS on your own.)

Luckysheet

Luckysheet is an online spreadsheet – it’s a lot like Microsoft Excel – with powerful data functions and tools. It’s user-friendly and open source. It even has quite a few built-in mathematical formulas and supports various table types.

RevKit

RevKit is a design system UI kit that works with Sketch, Figma, and Adobe XD. It includes plenty of organized components that you can pop right into designs to help get them started faster. It also includes a style guide, elements, and form controls. The download is free.

Card

Card allows you to store social media profiles, websites, and files in a customized profile. Share it in one click. Replace awkward contact exchange and multiple usernames with a simple QR code or link.

Scale Nucleus

Scale Nucleus helps visualize data, curate interesting slices within your dataset, review and manage annotations, and measure and debug model performance. This tool claims to be “the right way” to develop ML models.

Previewed

Previewed is a mockup generator to create beautiful promotional graphics for your app. Browse a variety of templates, pick one, customize, and download your design to show off.

NSFW Filter

NSFW Filter is a browser extension that blocks images that aren’t safe for work. The best part is that it runs locally in-browser and doesn’t access any of your data. Plus, it saves you from on-the-job embarrassment.

ColorFlick for Dribbble

ColorFlick for Dribbble is another browser extension that makes it easy to copy hex codes from the tool to your clipboard with ease. You can also create palettes you can share from your favorite shots using Coolors.

Tabler Icons

Tabler Icons is a collection of more than 550 SVG icons that you can customize. Change the color, size, or stroke width with on-screen controls and then click to copy the icons you want to use. It’s that simple!

Teenyicons

Teenyicons might be some of the cutest icons out there. This collection includes minimal 1px icons in outline or solid fills. And there are plenty of icons to choose from. Adjust the size and grab the ones that you need for projects.

Basicons

Basicons is a set of simple icons for product design and development. Plus, they are updated weekly.

Chozy Mermaid

Chozy Mermaid is a super funky novelty typeface to close out summer. The characters feature beach themes within slab characters. It might be hard to find an application for this one, but it is too fun not to share.

Dotuku

Dotuku is a dingbats font with a back to school theme. The limited character set features filled and outline styles that are perfect for classrooms.

Margin

Margin is a fun retro style typeface with a 1970s vibe. It’s a “chubby serif” with 60 characters and 58 glyphs.

Rollanda

Rollanda is a signature-style script with a thicker weight and rough stroke. The character set is pretty robust.

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

After six months of uncertainty 2020 is finally beginning to find a style of its own. There are nods to Brutalism, a delightful blending of 80s pastels with 90s primaries, and the font style of choice is anything but geometric sans-serif.

In this month’s collection of the freshest sites from the past four weeks you’ll find tons of new portfolios, from big agencies to freelancers, and some amazing primal scream therapy. Enjoy!

Looks Like You Need Iceland

Looks Like You Need Iceland is an incredible site that asks you to record a scream, that they’ll broadcast for you into the wide open spaces of Iceland as therapy. And then perhaps you’ll visit Iceland for real. It’s brilliant marketing for the Iceland tourist board.

Riverlane

The abstract 3D animation on Riverlane’s site is a stunning introduction to a topic that’s hard to visualize. The rest of the site is equally well done, with great typography, slick brand assets, and a professional engaging tone.

Monokai

Wimer Hazenberg’s site features a simple pixelated text column. But scroll down the page and keep an eye on the awesome text dissolve effect, it transforms this simple design.

I Weigh Community

The I Weigh Community is a non-profit community activism initiative helmed by Jameela Jamil. It’s devoted to radical inclusivity, and it promotes its message on its site with striking graphics and bold, expressive typography.

WAKA WAKA

Waka Waka is a design studio specializing in wooden furniture. The noise effect and the mid-century typography evoke the radical design of 60 years ago. The random rotations on the thumbnail hovers are delightfully disruptive.

Dataveyes

Dataveyes is an information design studio that works with large datasets to give meaning to complex information. Its site features beautiful, full-screen animations that illustrate the type of information it specializes in.

Year & Day

Year & Day is an ecommerce site that sells ceramics, glassware, and other choice pieces of tableware. It’s a colorful collection that perfectly complements your food and the stunning site takes its cues from the collection.

Dunderville

Dunderville is a motion design studio with an impressive portfolio of animation and live action films. Its site features a tactile paper fold detail, and as you would expect, some superb text, and vector animations.

André Venâncio

It’s been months since we last saw a creative developer’s site with a liquid effect. André Venâncio revisits the idea with a cool oil bubble effect, hover over the thumbnails to see it.

Thomas Prior

It’s not all 60s revivalism, pastels, and cute animations. There will always be room for minimalism, and nothing suits this style as well as portfolios for photographers; Thomas Prior’s site is a prime example.

Serra

Serra’s site features a really beautiful high-contrast typeface that sits apart from the usual sans-serif. The product page is all colored product photography. It exudes luxury and distinction in a saturated marketplace.

VYBES

VYBES is a CBD drink made in LA. Its site evokes the Californian spirit with baby pink brand colors and sun-bleached photography. It’s a cool, and ever so slightly Brutalist look for what is essentially a health drink.

Karina Sirqueira

We love the simplicity of Karina Sirqueira’s portfolio. The desaturated rainbow leads to a simple slideshow of projects, and it’s refreshing to see a minimal site that uses bold serif-based typography. The content feels fresh and honest too.

Smalls

Smalls produces healthy food for cats. The site, is packed with adorable pictures of kitties, which if you’re a cat person, is guaranteed to draw you in. There’s a definite Brutalist style to the site, and lots of color too.

Wildist

There’s a clear aesthetic beginning to emerge in 2020, with pastels creating a soft background for desaturated primaries, and Wildist gets it exactly right with this youthful, site that features just enough animation to bring it to life.

Kristen Kwong

We’ve seen a lot of OS-style sites recently, but Kristen Kwong’s is one of the slickest. It manages to take a simple metaphor for interaction and transform it with a vintage color scheme.

Stojo

Continuing the Miami-meets-Brutalism trend this month is the site for Stojo, a collapsable cup and bottle. The pastel shades block out a disrupted grid, but for our money it works better on mobile. The vintage typeface is a nice touch.

Hoang Nguyen

Hoang Nguyen’s site features a surreal 3D scene with mountains, a spinning planet, floating islands, a waterfall, and a floating dragon-boy. Click around the site and the scene transforms.

SMTH / Sam Smith

Sam Smith’s portfolio has a cool magazine style to it, with a nice blocky background on the text and a personality packed animated avatar taking centre stage.

Then I Met You

Then I met You is a site promoting a range of skincare products. In this case, the usual pastel colors are replaced with an 80s-style gradient. Watch the products as you scroll, the lighting changes creating an awesome, subtle 3D effect.

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Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot

When it comes to increasing sales for your ecommerce store, there are 3 levers you can pull: You can increase your average order value; You can increase the amount of traffic to your site; You can increase your conversion rate.

While all of the above are important, the cheapest, most effective way to grow your sales is by improving your conversion rate.

For most online stores, low conversion rates are typically the result of a poor design or a bad user experience. Your visitors may not resonate with the look and feel of your website or they may have problems finding the information they need in order to make a purchase.

In this post, I will walk you through the exact steps I took to increase my desktop conversion rate by 46% and my mobile conversion rate by 39% with my last site redesign. I will also show you how you can apply these same design principles to optimize the conversion rate for your own online store.

Even if your ecommerce business is already performing well, this post will help you achieve even better results.

What Is Considered A Good Ecommerce Conversion Rate? 

Monitoring your conversion rate is crucial to building a profitable ecommerce business. And most analytics tools can help you measure this data out of the box.

Your conversion rate is calculated by simply dividing the number of desired actions by the number of website visitors in a given period. For example, if your website is getting 50 conversions for every 5,000 visitors, your conversion rate is 1%.

Depending on the specific type of online business you run, your conversions may include online sales, email signups, add to carts, or any other KPI you wish to measure. But in the case of an ecommerce store, your primary focus should be your purchase conversion rate.

On average, ecommerce stores have a purchase conversion rate of 1% – 2%. What’s more, experts say a good conversion rate is anywhere from 2% to 5%. This should be your baseline as you measure your online store’s success.

The Conversion Results of My Last Site Redesign

Before we dive into the nitty gritty details of how I improved my conversion rate, here are my overall results and exactly how I conducted my experiment.

First off, I run Bumblebee Linens, an ecommerce store that sells handkerchiefs online.

Because my site gets a ton of traffic from content pages that do not directly convert to sales, I measured my conversion rate based on my most predictable traffic sources.

As a result, all of my conversion data was taken from targeted PPC ad traffic sources like Google Shopping and Google Adwords. After all, my Google ads traffic is very steady and always converts at a consistent percentage.

Before I redesigned my site, the conversion rate for my ecommerce store hovered at around 3% which is above average. But the look and feel of the site was dated and desperately needed a refresh. Overall, the entire redesign took approximately 7 weeks and cost me roughly $1840.

Here are the conversion results from my updated design compared to the original:

  • Desktop conversion rates increased by 46%
  • Mobile conversion rates increased by 26% 
  • Tablet conversion rates increased by 32% 

The remainder of this post will highlight the specific elements of the redesign that contributed to these increases. (Note: I made all of my redesign changes live simultaneously so it’s difficult to determine which specific optimization contributed the most gains.)

8 Ecommerce Design Tips To Optimize Your Conversion Rate

If your ecommerce store is not performing as well as it should, there are many aspects of the user experience that could be negatively impacting sales. Even a seemingly innocuous design choice like your font size or the color of your buttons can have a significant impact on your overall conversion rate.

If you want to systematically improve the conversion rate for your ecommerce store, you should follow these 8 design steps.

1. Use A Consistent and Complementary Color Scheme 

Use color.adobe.com to choose complementary colors when redesigning your website.

A well chosen color scheme can instantly attract a customer’s attention, evoke emotion, and drive users to take action. After all, how a customer feels about your website can be the deciding factor between completing checkout or bouncing from your shop.

A well designed ecommerce store should utilize at least 3 complementary colors that are consistently applied across every page of your website.

If you don’t have a good eye for color, you can use a free tool like color.adobe.com which will help you mix and match different colors that go well together.

For my site redesign, I wanted a modern feel so I chose teal, hot pink, and yellow for my color palette.

I also assigned each color a specific purpose on my site:

  • Teal was applied to give the site a bright, overall color for a young and hip feel;
  • Yellow was used to draw attention to marketing elements like free shipping and special offers;
  • Hot Pink was used for all action buttons on the site.

Overall, every single page of your ecommerce store should have 1 main call to action (using a bright color like hot pink) that guides a customer closer towards checkout.

For example on my front page, the hot pink button “Shop Our Personalized Collection” pops out of the page and catches a user’s attention right away. We want visitors to shop our personalized collection because our personalized products are the highest margin products in our store.

2. Simplify Your Navigation 

Is your menu too complicated? Is your navbar taking up too much screen real estate?

A good rule of thumb for an ecommerce store is to minimize the number of clicks for a customer to add to cart. As a result, you should avoid nesting your product categories in more than 1 level of hierarchy.

If you have too many categories in your shop to display all at once, choose your best selling categories for your main menu and lump your less trafficked categories in a separate tab.

For my store, I decided to use a top-level, hover style drop-down menu as shown in the photo below.

Top-level navigation is one way to organize and display your product categories.

My old design utilized left hand style navigation which took up too much screen real estate. And freeing up the extra space allowed me to blow up my category and product images by 300%. With my new navigation menu, every visitor can add to cart in just three clicks: One click to find a product category; One click to view the product description; One click to add to cart.

Once you’ve designed your menu, pretend that you are a customer and try to shop on your site. Is the content easy to read? Do the important elements pop out? Can you find the information you need right away? Analyzing your site from a customer’s perspective will help you improve your users’ shopping experience.

3. Display Trust Factors On Every Page 

Free shipping, easy returns, and trust are crucial to driving conversions. 

Trust is the most important value you must establish with your customer.

Unless you’re Amazon or a big box store, people have likely never heard of your brand and you have to reassure them that it’s safe to buy from your store.

Due to Amazon’s influence in the ecommerce space, most customers look for 3 things when shopping at an online boutique for the first time:

  • Fast and free shipping;
  • Easy returns;
  • A way to reach customer support.

Displaying your phone number and email address is very important! Adding your store hours also helps to make your site look legit to new visitors. If you don’t have a recognizable brand, customers will want to know that they can reach a real human in case of problems or questions.

In the above image, you’ll notice that I placed my trust factors in the header, so they can be seen above the fold on every single page. We’ve also been featured on the Today show and a bunch of magazines. So I made sure to display this social proof on the bottom of every page.

Don’t hesitate to flaunt your achievements to reinforce trust. 

In addition, customer testimonials provide social proof and credibility to your website. As a result, it’s important to regularly reach out to happy customers for testimonials and endorsements. On our redesigned site, you’ll find the testimonials section right below our press mentions.

Testimonials lend social proof and credibility to your website.

Remember, to generate conversions as an unknown store or brand, you first have to gain your customers’ trust. Make it easy for them to contact you or get a full refund if anything goes wrong with their purchase. By showing a genuine concern for customer satisfaction, you’ll be able to build a solid reputation over time.

4. Emphasize Your Unique Value Proposition

Users spend an average of 5.59 seconds looking at your website’s written content. And in those 5.59 seconds, you must capture their interest or else they’ll bounce from your page. Right off the bat, you must convey to a user exactly what you sell and why they should buy from your store over a competitor.

What’s more, every single page on your site should communicate your unique value proposition. A unique value proposition is a concise statement that describes what makes your business special and outlines what your store does better than anyone else. The best way to show off your unique value proposition is to use an eye-catching image alongside compelling copy.

For example, here’s the first thing a user sees on my home page above the fold:

Right away, a user is shown a large image of one of our best selling personalized handkerchiefs. And right beside that image is a clear and concise value proposition, followed by a call to action to shop in our store.

Displaying your value proposition should not be limited to your home page. We also include our unique value proposition on every category page as well. Overall, you should include your value proposition on every landing page on your website.

5. Optimize The Visual Hierarchy Of Your Product Pages 

Every page on your site should have a single objective. And for your product pages, your goal is to get a customer to add to cart.

When designing a product page, you must apply a logical visual hierarchy to your design. A visual hierarchy is the order in which a user processes information on a page and in the case of a product page, there must be a clear path to your add to cart button with as few distractions as possible.

Here’s a screenshot of my old product page:

As you can see, my old product page is overwhelming. All of the design elements try to grab your attention at the same time and there are many different calls to action that blend together. To improve my product descriptions, I freshened up the color scheme and enlarged my product image by 266%. I also changed the placement of the buttons in a more logical flow.

Here’s what the redesigned product page looks like today:

By adjusting the size, color, contrast, and alignment of the page elements, I now force the customer to process my product information in a set path that leads directly to my primary call to action. For example, the hot pink color draws attention to the “Add to Cart” button over the “Reviews” button. Also, by applying a blue text color and teal background, I reassure customers that shopping with us is safe and risk free.

Overall, rearranging the design elements this way nearly doubled my add to cart percentage.

6. Simplify Your Checkout Process 

With our old site design, we would regularly receive feedback from confused customers who weren’t sure if they needed an account to purchase our products.

Here’s what our old checkout page looked like:

As you can see, there are too many choices. After all, a customer doesn’t need 3 ways to checkout and the choices are a little overwhelming.

Here’s what the checkout page looks like now:

Instead of offering 3 separate options for checkout, I consolidated them all into one and added a separate Paypal option (more on this later). First off, less than 6% of customers create an account so there was no reason to offer account creation as a separate option. Furthermore, displaying a login form was causing more headaches than it was worth because the majority of customers don’t even have an account. As a result, I decided to hide the form altogether by default.

Overall, when you are designing your checkout process, keep these optimization principles in mind.

Principle #1: Remove all unnecessary elements from the page. Don’t make the customer think and hide all elements that are not frequently used.

Principle #2: Display trust logos to assure customers of a secure checkout. In the image above, you’ll find trust logos on the right-hand side of the checkout page.

7. Optimize The Checkout Process For Mobile Users

4 out of 10 mobile users abandon their carts if they have a hard time entering their personal information. People don’t like entering their contact and credit card information using a tiny keyboard. What’s more, small buttons and too many form fields drive away mobile users. 79% of smartphone users shop online with their mobile devices, which is why you should optimize for mobile.

These days, a responsive design is par for the course but you can still screw things up if you are not careful. Here’s what my checkout process looks like on a desktop:

And here’s how the checkout page looks on a mobile device:

On mobile, the user’s cart contents are collapsed so it doesn’t occupy the entire screen. Overall, here were the mobile optimizations I made to checkout:

Optimization #1: Keep Your Checkout Form Short And Sweet

A mobile user should be able to tap buttons on your checkout page without accidentally hitting another option. Also, the buttons should be large enough to tap on a mobile device.

Given the smaller screen size of a mobile phone, keep your checkout form short and sweet with no extraneous options. Also, make sure you turn off autocorrect for your form fields. Otherwise, your phone’s autocorrect feature may frustrate users when they try to enter their address. In fact, we once had a customer get so frustrated trying to type in their city on their iPhone that they called us up and complained in frustration.

To fix this, you simply need to add the following tag to all of your text input fields.

<input type="text" name="name" autocorrect="off">

And to reduce frustration, you should also turn off auto-capitalization and auto-complete by adding auto-capitalization=”off” and auto-complete=”off” to all of your forms as well:

<input type="text" name="name" autocorrect="off" auto-capitalization="off" auto-complete="off">

In addition, for phone number entry, you should always display a numeric keypad as opposed to a regular keyboard:

Optimization #2: Automatically Import Your Customer Data If Possible

The less information mobile users have to enter in, the better. Payment options like Paypal Express and Amazon Payments can simplify the checkout process. These third-party payment processors automatically fill out a customer’s billing and shipping information which reduces typing and increases conversion rates.

To offer a more convenient checkout, I implemented PayPal One Touch, which alone increased my mobile conversion rates by 31%.

Here’s a quick tip when implementing Paypal: Make sure you display the Paypal button early in the checkout process before a user has entered in their information. Otherwise, it defeats the purpose of importing their information! In the first step of my checkout process, I explain each payment option in depth.

These simple changes made a huge difference in my conversion rate. And the number of PayPal users on my site nearly doubled from 13% to 23%!

8. Add A Sense Of Urgency

Most customers like to window shop and the best way to get a visitor to take action is to create a sense of urgency.

Whenever I run a sale, a big yellow countdown timer is displayed on every page of the website.

Note: It’s important to note that we only utilize this timer when there is actually a sale going on. Otherwise, you risk desensitizing your customers or losing trust.

In addition, I also display a countdown timer on the checkout page to create a sense of urgency to complete the payment process:

These extra design elements force a customer to take action sooner rather than later.

Final thoughts

Optimizing your conversion rate is an ongoing process. And testing your results is the only way to track your improvement.

Never go with your gut and always listen to the data. After all, sometimes an ugly site can out-convert a beautiful one.

Regardless, the design tips I demonstrated above will give you a solid foundation to start with. From there, you can further improve your website and optimize your conversion rate through repeated testing and tweaks. Good luck!

Source


Source de l’article sur Webdesignerdepot