lamp-white-knockout-8px
Contact

Web Design

Why Minimalist Designs Work Well for Product Sales Websites

In modern web design, the more streamlined, focused experience you can give your visitors, the better your results. Far from a niche style, Minimalism is actually key to any good professional website today.

Web design is all about appealing to your customer’s eye and drawing them back again and again to your site. In eCommerce design, the ultimate goal is getting your product purchased. A well thought-out, appealing design will keep your viewer engaged, while supporting the credibility of your product, site, and business as a whole.

As web designers, we have seen many designs become overworked, under-planned and simply unfocused. An experienced web designer learns to balance design versus functionality and simplicity versus gimmicks. While staying at the forefront of web trends is a goal for any site, an e-commerce site’s main focus has to be getting the consumer to purchase the product.

Lulu Lemon

Remember websites in the early 90’s? Busy, info-packed layouts with bright flashing colors that lit up your screen like a disco ball? Although we find those early designers’ “more is more” enthusiasm for the brand-new online world a little endearing, web design has come a long way since. Research shows us that less really is more when it comes to engaging visitor attention, and success online is all about how your site shapes people’s focus. Caption: If your site still looks like this, it’s time for an upgrade!

Minimalist aesthetics are a popular design strategy in e-commerce today. The style directs customer focus to the product immediately, eliminating any clutter that would distract the viewer. Minimalist design allows the product to become the focal point of the site. By breaking a design down to the bare essentials, you can produce a clean, but very functional site. A good minimalist designer knows how to use white space, create balance and contrast, and precisely focus the content. These types of designs guide the viewer’s eye- not to flashy ephemeral web trends, but the clear-cut star of the site, the product.

Companies sometimes shy away from minimalist designs for fear they might look unfinished or too simple, but when they’re done right, minimalist designs are some of the most beautiful, classic and engaging sites on the web.

One great example of minimalist design is MagicLamp site Odin New York. By simply showcasing their products through high quality imagery, Odin created a storefront that exudes the high class, fashion forward image it’s known for. With simple lines, clean typography, generous white space and outstanding product photography, Odin uses clean, minimal design to focus on what their site is for: selling their products. Another excellent example of using minimalist design to focus on the end goal is PosePrints. PosePrints created a cohesive site aesthetic with careful use of white space that draws the eye to the product focal point. Using a simple monochromatic color scheme, the only flashy items on this site are the products themselves. The stationary card images are the color and the “pop” that stand out on this site. PosePrints’ design gives the customers a sense of style without distracting them from the product itself.

Pose Prints

 

When it comes to web design and minimalism, remember “less is more” and sometimes less can bring you more…revenue.

 

Web Design Garage by Marc Campbell

Web Design Garage by Marc Campbell

Web Design Garage is an easy to follow book that walks the reader through many of the challenges web designers face everyday, with solutions that are elegant and easy to implement. While I highly recommend it for novice designers, it is also a good read for experienced designers who are looking for new ways to approach usability problems or design constraints. The book covers a broad range of topics, and helps move the reader from the old way of doing things (HTML 3) to CSS and HTML 4 and XHTML. The single most important part of this book is getting the reader to pay more attention to CSS and how it can be used to

    • Shorten HTML Code

 

    • Make your site’s look and feel more extensible and scalable

 

    • Deal with formatting problems the right way.

 


Another topic which stands out is how to properly format pages using standard HTML markup such that readers, web crawlers, and special accessability programs can all read and understand the page. Heavy use of < h X > tags are a good example.

Links for this book:

 

Don’t Make Me Think

Don’t Make Me Think by Steve Krug (2nd Edition)

Book Review by Jason Robinson

Summary: Designing sites for usability can increase the Return-On-Investment for any website, and how users actually use your website may be dramatically different than how you think they use it.

Don’t Make Me Think is a substantial book, not because it is a long book (by contrast, it is short and concise) but because it offers fundamental guidance and experienced perspective on common problems that web producers will encounter, and how different members of the team will view the problem in contrast to what users (generally speaking) see. Steve Krug’s background is extensive, but suffice it to say he has not only been developing websites for years, but he has run many usability studies for clients, and offers this book as your map to understanding usability and how to navigate it through the political waters of your web design projects.

The book runs the gamut, starting out with how web site visitors generally muddle their way through a web site. Then he moves into topics such as designing web pages for scanning (bullets and short summaries belong on the home page, not long paragraphs of text), and how to constructively guide visitors through the process of finding what they are looking for, even if they start on the wrong page (think inbound links from a search engine). From here, he discusses fundamental navigation elements and proper placement and making sure they get the attention deserved through use of size, placement, and coloring.

Starting with Chapter 8, Steve starts in on the dealing with usability as the political football it often is, and how to deal with arguments between the designers and the developers, with the idea being to present usability as a fundamental aspect of the site and not as an afterthought. The book then goes into anecdotal examples of how one can run usability study for very little (to no) money, and still get 80% of the effect of running a many-thousand dollar study by a third party.

Steve summarizes the whole point of usability with the idea that people come to your site with a certain amount of trust and anticipation, and for every mistake you make with usability, that amount goes down, until they finally leave the site. This is sometimes a hard concept for people to grasp, and yet it is pervasive across all demographics, and this section should be read aloud to a team who is working on a product sales site, as it willeffect the bottom line.

The rest of the book offers guidance on improving usability through different web tools and CSS, with additional resources and further reading. The sample letters to your boss Steve provides in the back of the book are more than fun, they could potentially help some people out there who are having a hard time convincing management that usability should not take a back seat to aesthetics.

I wish every designer and developer would read this book, it would make design meetings so much easier.

 

We are an account based marketing agency.

Marketing

Company

Follow Us

Twitter Facebook-f Linkedin