Maximise your brand's online impact via responsive web design. Digital agency Lava Digital explains how-to.
Online shopping is undeniably entrenched in the consumer experience and most people are pretty comfy and confident with it. But with that confidence and familiarity comes the demand for more – for a better experience.
People aren’t just shopping on their desktop anymore – they’re shopping on their smartphones, tablets and laptops too. This is known as ‘multiscreening’. Someone sees an outfit on TV, they check it out on their tablet. A friend texts a link to a new clothing range, they’re looking at it on their phone. The urge to purchase can strike at any time and you need to be able to give your customers a seamless and satisfying online shopping experience across every possible mobile device.
Think about it – you can’t expect an IMAX movie to give you the same thrill on a tablet, so you can’t expect your customers to get the same level of engagement with your fashion product if it’s a large-format website crunched onto a smartphone screen.
We’ve become so used to accessing sites wherever and whenever we want, but so many sites haven’t been designed to rise to the multiscreen challenge. It’s important that your site has the design muscle not to wimp out on it.
That’s where responsive design enters the picture.
Responsive design means making a site that will work – and look good - no matter what device you’re using it on. The design should reconfigure to showcase the product according to the screen you’re accessing it on, it shouldn’t just be the regular site in miniature. This is especially important in fashion, where photography, detail and visuals are key.
A great example of an already beautiful online store in the process of taking their site to the next level is Melbourne’s Elk Accessories. Their current site is elegant, restrained and works beautifully, but they’ve had it for five years now and Adam and Marnie, the partners in Elk, have recognised that both online shopping and technology have moved with the times, so a new approach is in order and a scaled-up site is due for launch in the first quarter of 2014.
Lava Digital, a boutique digital agency in Melbourne, built the original site so they knew the product inside out, and knew the time was right to redesign the site so it could showcase the products across new technologies and give the photography the emphasis and room it deserves.
Lava wanted to redesign the site while staying true to Elk’s boutique feel – their colour palette and intimate brand appeal. They wanted to present a ‘Ta-daa!’ site that worked so smoothly across all devices you didn’t even think about it because all the hard work was going on in the background, behind the simple, subtle design.
It’s very important online fashion retail adopts responsive design – it’s just not effective to take a site that looks fine on a desktop and simply replicate it wholesale without acknowledging how and where people are going to interact with it. Fashion should be presented online with the aim of highlighting every last seam, and customers should be able to interact and shop without pushing a screen around and scrambling to view the ‘shop now’ button.
Remember online shopping is a 24/7 pursuit – does your site have the muscle to keep up? Keep an eye out for Elk’s new site in early 2014 to see how it’s done.