As someone who has always loved fashion and retail in every capacity, the thought has crossed my mind a time or two of what it might be like to fulfill the dream of owning my own boutique. But dreams can’t become a reality unless you have a plan. If you’re someone who has been brave enough to take the leap and start your own boutique, just know I’m proud of you. Also, I’d like to play a positive role in ensuring your business is ready and able to take on many new customers. And what’s the best and most important way to do that? By creating a fully-optimized website that is easy for customers to navigate and accurately showcases what your business has to offer. Let’s do a deep dive on how you can accomplish this.
What elements make for an optimal website?
When approaching the creation of your boutique’s website, there’s a few elements that you’ll want to pay close attention to. These elements include overall color scheme, clickable buttons, clear and relevant images and videos, a spot for customers to subscribe to marketing emails, and lastly, an obvious navigation bar.
To start, color scheme can be an element that either adds or subtracts from your overall image. In the fashion and retail industry, you do have some wiggle room when it comes to color scheme because depending on your brand and demographic, more color may be better suited rather than sticking with neutrals. More importantly, make sure there’s contrast and things like text content aren’t disappearing. But the idea is to maintain cohesiveness throughout the website and make sure whatever color scheme you pick makes sense for your brand.
When adding clickable buttons, such as links to social media pages or prompt to purchase, be sure that they’re linked properly and they don’t bounce back. Your potential customer will get frustrated and possibly leave your website if they’re unable to access what they need. Additionally, make sure it’s abundantly clear what is a clickable button to ensure a seamless transaction between you and your customers.
In the same idea, be sure that a website navigation bar is in the most obvious spot you can put it. This makes it much more likely for a customer to stick around and take a look at everything your website and brand has to offer, hopefully leading to checking out with a full cart.
Again, with being involved in the fashion industry, everything isn’t always so serious and you may have some more creative freedoms when adding relevant images and videos to your page. What I think is most important in this scenario, is to be careful in not weighing down your website with an overabundance of pictures and videos. This can be distracting and overwhelming to users and it can cause them to leave your website without ever seeing your products and considering a purchase.
Next, you’ll want to include in multiple areas of your website, a clear spot for customers to opt-in to promotional emails or text messages. This is how you build excitement about new product launches and also create loyal customers.
Examples of Optimal vs. Suboptimal Retail Websites
As seen here on the left, Anthropologie’s website would be considered optimal. All of the text on the page can be easily read, the website navigation bar is in an obvious spot, and on the front page they’re including a holiday party edit to get customers ready and excited to purchase their holiday outfits from them.
In the image on the right, we have ZARA as our example of a suboptimal website. They’ve been notorious for having a supremely difficult website for customers to navigate. While they’ve made some improvements, there’s still plenty to be fixed, such as the white font that can barely be seen over this image. Additionally, ZARA has managed to take the top spot on HubSpot’s list of 19 Examples of Bad Website Design in 2024 [+ What They Got Wrong].
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