Design Tips

Last updated Dec 27, 2016

Web design evolves daily. What is the hot design trend one day is out-dated the next. In order to keep your site current without regular re-designs, you'll want to implement tried-and-true strategies for formatting and stay away from temporary fads.

All design tips in the articles below are focused on long-term design to create beautiful lasting designs.

General Site Design

Add a Favicon
Favicons are the tiny site icons that appear in the navigation bar of your browser. This is a good design practice because it shows your customers a more polished website.

Web-safe Fonts
Adding fonts onto the server, using Google fonts, or selecting a web-safe font for your website is the best way to make sure all customers see the same (or very similar) fonts when they visit your website.

General Design Improvements
Learn about some quick tips to enhance your current look, including adding fonts and getting your website mobile optimized. Also learn about home page do's and don'ts for carousels, featured products, and more.

Ajax Sign In
Enable your customers to sign into their account without leaving the page they are on with the Ajax sign in feature.

Smaller General Site Design Tips

Updating Store Buttons
Each theme in ShopSite comes with it's own set of buttons, either images or buttons created with CSS. If you are creating a custom template you can customize the buttons in your ShopSite store to match your custom site design.


Mobile Design

Responsive Design Overview
When getting started with responsive design there are a few things you should implement and be aware of including meta tags for mobile, and tips for responsive design.

Mobile CGI
If you would like to have a mobile-ready website but do not want to use one of ShopSite's built in responsive design themes and don't want to create a custom template, using ShopSite's mobile CGI feature may be the way to go. Keep in mind this feature is outdated and it is recommended you use responsive design, but in a pinch this is a great temporary solution.


Shopping Cart Design

Remove Company Name Field
If you accept credit cards, and most your customers are individuals, you likely can remove the "company name" field on the checkout screen. Merchants often want to remove this field simply so that there are fewer fields on the checkout screen. Fewer fields on the checkout screen allow customers to checkout faster, thus lessening the chance for cart abandonment.


Images and Banners