No matter how brilliant your product might be, you still need to build a website that will appeal to your target audience, prevent any potential glitches on your site, and deliver consistently valuable content. Still, as someone who is willing to learn and advance, you can and should keep up with the latest web design trends as well as their implications for your online business.
For starters, you need a trusted platform that allows your customers a safe, seamless, and branded shopping experience, and one that you can manage with ease. Enter: Magento. The modern e-commerce platform chosen by the top players in the industry for its many an intuitive feature and flexibility. That is precisely what makes it an excellent choice both for small businesses, solopreneurs, and large corporations looking to expand.
Look for the best Magento theme
Before you move onto the actual website-building segment, you should take your time when choosing the most compatible Magento theme for your store. While there are literally thousands of merchants using this platform, each of them has found a way to customize and personalize the given framework to match your brand identity.
You’ll notice that in their available themes and templates, every one of them is adjusted to fit a certain industry (or several of them), while at the same time it provides enough flexibility to meet your specific needs. Make sure that your theme of choice is easy to navigate, has enough color options, and that it’s SEO-friendly so that you can make your brand known on the web.
Pick your hosting provider
To put things in perspective, Australia alone has produced over $20 billion in revenue from eCommerce sales, making it one of the fastest flourishing markets in the world. Imagine the pressure competing businesses in this arena feel when faced with such a soaring rise in profit, as well as the technical capabilities needed to support such a buying tempo. In order to make your store not only competitive but also stable, bug-free, and safe, you need a hosting provider that will keep your store up and running through the most challenging of sales (think: Black Friday and Cyber Monday).
Also Read: Shopify for ecommerce
With the potential to grow even further, it makes sense that using Magento in Sydney and other thriving cities is one of the best ways to ensure every customer’s security as well as satisfaction. Magento paired with the right hosting partner is the best way to move forward with your store. Your hosting provider is there to prevent and mitigate damage, site crashes, and optimize your website’s performance.
Installation and Customization
Now that you have chosen your theme and your hosting, you can move onto installing the Magento package, which is a fairly simple and self-guided process. Make sure that you have access to software such as Photoshop or Adobe Dreamweaver in order to be able to customize the imagery and visuals of your brand.
The Magento Installation Assistant will help guide you through the needed steps. Even though this particular part of the process doesn’t require direct work with the underlying code, it’s a good idea to have an expert Magento developer check your store once you’re done, or monitor the process with you. You will have your theme’s accompanying documents to walk you through the process of applying your theme upon installing the platform itself.
You’ll notice that the platform is fairly customizable, which gives you plenty of wiggle room to make your store unique. This is where an expert will also be of use, since you will want them to configure any desired changes well before your website goes live: anything from changing the layout, to altering colors can help create a more unified, branded experience.
Focus on your product catalogue
Before you launch your website, you should make sure that all of your products are imported, which you can either do on your own, or rely on someone to do that while you focus on other aspects of growing your business. While it’s not technically demanding once you have determined the layout and the theme specifications, you can then create a product catalogue that will give a clear overview of your offers online.
Connect with your social outlets
Magento makes for a wonderful selling platform for yet another modern feature: connecting with social media. Since the vast majority of online consumers will rely on their social networks for making purchasing decisions, it only stands to reason that using social integrations with Magento has become one of the go-to trends for e-commerce experts.
Configure your payment and shipping
Living in a world of choices and convenience means that your business needs to provide both. Make sure that your Magento store has a multitude of payment options, from PayPal to different bank transfers, as well as mobile payments to cater to a growing population of mobile buyers. Depending on where you run your business, your shipping and tax configurations will depend on the local laws, so make sure that you brush up on your legal and bureaucratic know-how to protect your business and your buyers.
Conclusion
Finally, after you launch your store, you need to remember that its success will heavily depend not just on its development and design, but also the way you manage and market it. Do your best to spread the word on your new store and use all of your channels to grow you Magento-based business wisely!
