Everything I need to know about Web Site Design I learned at the Mall
Posted by Martin Wessel on Mon, Oct 18, 2010
You might think that there's no connection between a shopping mall retail outlet and your website. But you'd definitely be wrong. Every store in a mall is trying to do the same thing your website is trying to do: Grab the attention of visitors and get them to come in. See the connection now? Most shoppers barely glance at the storefronts, and most visitors will spend seconds on the first page they see of your site.
Most major retailers spend a fortune fine tuning the first impression of their store. In general, these fall into three categories:
- "Don't you wish you were cool enough to shop here?"
- "You'd look so cool with this stuff!"
- "See what all the cool people are doing!"
The first type of design concentrates on creating an environment, a unique look and feel that very often doesn't show any product at all. Think of this as a brochure type site that works great for small product lines or concentrated messages. It's not that you don't have any products to sell or information to convey, it's that you want a generate a certain mood as well.
The second type of design is the most traditional, with store fronts full of carefully crafted displays showing products to their best example. Many e-commerce sites use this design as well, simply because it works so well. Information only sites can implement this design by presenting some carefully crafted bullet points on the home page that lead to more detail inside the site.
The final design is used by stores like Apple, where the store front display is, at most, a poster of the newest product. The actual draw is all the people who are in the store using the products. This becomes a very people-driven web site, with lots of feedback and customer pictures.
The difference is that a store front in a mall is always the first impression, a web site needs to make a branding statement on every page. But once you've got the branding established you'll be able to pull the critical elements through all parts of your site.
That's just a very high level overview, of course. We'll cover how to do some of those specifics in upcoming posts.