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Choosing a Website Template for Your Online Store

As online stores continue to make their mark on the market, it’s more important than ever to ensure your ecommerce company stands out. Beyond developing a strong product line, business name, and digital brand identity, having a professional website puts you ahead of fellow competitors.

Rather than starting your web design from scratch, a drag-and-drop online store template can help you create a memorable brand — without design or coding experience. When it comes to choosing the right online store website template for your business, consider the following.

Online store templates

Showcasing your products with a professional website template immediately tells any shoppers that you take your business—and their satisfaction—seriously. If your website fonts are easy to read, the colors match the rest of your branding, and your custom logo is placed front and center, it’s clear to consumers that you’re a legitimate shop they can trust. 

Beyond looking beautiful and professional to shoppers, online store templates help your business run better internally. With a focus on seamless built-in functionality, choosing an ecommerce website template brings your products to life with merchandising tools that streamline your operations.

Not only can you organize and manage an unlimited number of sortable products, but shoppers receive a polished browsing experience through rich product descriptions and embedded videos, plus unique images for each product variant.

See 7 of our favorite store templates

Site structure and navigation

When it comes time to choose the right template for your site, it’s essential to determine the primary functions you’ll require in order to run your business well.  Map out the essential pages your website needs in order to sell your products, connect with customers, and create a cohesive user experience. Typically, you’ll want to start with a homepage, about page, shop/product page, blog page, and contact page. This way, you’re not only introducing visitors to your vision, products, and team, but the addition of a blog page drives organic traffic with built-in SEO—so more shoppers find you from search engines.

Read our full guide to ecommerce SEO

Narrative flow

Craft the copy for each page, based on your brand’s overarching personality and goals. Once you know what you want to say—and how you’d like to say it—choosing a store template is simplified since you can envision the content sections and how they may flow together.

Store layout design

Once your content is created, center your efforts on the web design of your ecommerce store. Effective design is a visual way to further reinforce your brand identity while encouraging new and recurring sales from shoppers. While there are infinite possibilities for bringing your vision to life, the focus is always on creating an intuitive and smooth user experience that makes it simple for them to find your products and complete the purchase. For example, you can customize the design of your product pages using a variety of product details page (PDP) layouts to better fit your visual brand identity.

This post on page design provides additional guidance, and our award-winning professionally designed  templates eliminate the guesswork of developing a professional and polished website for your small business.

Ready to take web design off your to-do list?

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