If you’re aiming to create a stylish fashion website and set up your own online business, you probably already know that you’re getting into a 3 trillion dollar market. You probably also know that among fashion and apparel businesses, appearance is everything, competition is fierce, and website design is a crucial aspect of your brand’s success. Before your customers make any buying decision, they need to be impressed by your visual offerings. So even if you have the best copy in the world, it’ll go unnoticed without the right imagery highlighting it. Fashion website design is all about style, and the style you use for your fashion brand site should be a reflection of the predominant style of your designs. Your brand needs to speak to your audience through your fashion site, and the story you sell online will help you build rapport with your existing clients and attract new customers. Not sure how to build a stylish fashion website for your brand? Follow the basic principles we’ll dish out in this article!
Step 1 – Create an Inventory
Before you can launch your fashion website, you’ll need to ensure you’ve got an idea of what it is you want to feature on your site. These are the pillars of your design elements. From your brand story to your designs and website logo, your materials will form the foundation of your website layout. Perhaps you need to start up a fashion blog as part of these initial steps of setting up your online fashion portfolio. If you’re not sure which elements to focus on for your business, have a look at what your competitors and other fashion designers are doing and, instead of copying them, use their ideas to inspire you.
Step 2 – Use a Great Web Development Platform Suitable for the Fashion Industry
If you’re skilled in designing websites from scratch, you probably have experience with software like Photoshop and Web Creator. However, if you’re not experienced in the matter, and most people are not web developers, it’s best to use a site builder with CMS. A CMS makes it much easier to design a fashion website (and any other website for that matter) because it comes with intuitive plug-ins that don't require coding skills to understand. These include the likes of WordPress, Squarespace, and Moto CMS, to name but a few. You can also choose to hire a web developer to build your fashion website if you’ve got the capital to invest in such services.
Step 3 – Pick a Stylish Design for Your Site
Regardless of whether you’re using templates, CMS, or the services of a web developer for your fashion website design, you’ll still be in charge of choosing a design for your website and online store, and it needs to appeal to your audience. Black-and-white and single-page web designs are classic solutions for fashion websites, but they’re only suitable to a handful of styles. When choosing your design, make sure you take the color palette, font size, image galleries, and on-page animation effects into account for each option. Step 4 – Expertly Target Your Audience with Localization You already know that fashion is one of the most competitive industries on the web, and that’s why you need a specific niche and content that addresses the cultural expectations of your existing audience and potential customers. With website localization, you’ll be able to offer audiences from various demographic areas content that is relevant to their cultural and linguistic expectations. Localization services can also help you boost your rankings with search engines by helping you focus on high-ranking keywords for a specific audience. It goes above and beyond just catering to different languages, it also makes a positive impression on new visitors since it caters to cultural nuances.
Step 5 – Consider Building Your Brand with Outsourced Assistance
If you’re planning on earning money with your fashion website, you’ll need to have a marketing professional on board. Service providers that specialize in digital marketing are one of the best ways of building your brand with BPO services. Involving a marketing professional from the start of the development process of your website is beneficial since they can suggest effective solutions to help optimize your eCommerce platform before it goes live. They can also assist with market research to help you narrow down and zoom in on the most lucrative target audiences.
Step 6 – Stay on Top of Trends for Fashion Websites
Just like fashion, the digital world of websites is always evolving, and it’s critical to stay in the loop of the trends. As this BA (Hons) in Fashion Design in Barcelona explains, it is important to develop an aesthetic style relevant to the international fashion audience of today. The major trends we’ve observed over the last five years are all connected to the mobile revolution. These include:
Responsive Web Design
A responsive web page layout auto-fits in any screen size. In the era of mobile devices like smartphones and tablets, you cannot afford to NOT have a responsive design since you’ll miss out on targeting mobile audiences.
Mobile Website
Mobile sites are alternatives to responsive web design. These individual sites are specifically designed for mobile phones and smart devices. So, if a mobile user visits your main website from their smartphone, they’re automatically redirected to your site’s mobile version.
Ready to Get Started with Your Fashion Design Website?
The fashion industry is high-paced and extremely competitive, and in this arena, the success of fashion brands depends heavily on appearances. Your fashion website’s success lies in the hands of its visual appeal, but once you’ve got the attention of the audience, you need to be able to seal the deal with impactful branding, style, and marketing content that speaks to the heart of the consumer. Remember, when designing your fashion store, you need to invest the time to really get to know your audience and incorporate that into your design ideas. Once you have a clear structure, a clean layout with the right color schemes, and localized content, you've got all the elements you need to build a basic online space where you can sell your fashion products!