Hello everyone. My name is Oren, Business Development Manager at BOA Ideas. BOA Ideas, for those who are unfamiliar, is a development company that focuses mainly on web projects. We build and develop websites, mostly e-commerce, on the Shopify platform - everything related to web solutions and projects in order to help with these types of things.
Today I want to talk to you about the topic of design. Quite a few people ask me at the beginning of their journeys, on the way to setting up a website, about design. And it's terribly important to me to give some highlights for those who are meeting the platform for the first time, or maybe even already took a few steps with it and are wondering about this issue of design.
Why Do I need a Design?
Let's start with the question that needs to be asked first. And the question needs to be asked from your side, of course: Why do I want a design? Why do I need a design? Is this definitely something I need today for my business?
Many times the answer will be yes. Even the Shopify themes, the official themes, are also basically a type of design that you choose to apply to your site, your store. So yes there is very very important significance, but the question is really which approach to take.
Option 1: Choosing a Shopify Theme
Like I said before, there is a more modest approach to things. And it’s basically the ability to choose the theme, from 70 themes, that will be the best for your business. The cost of the design will be $180 and you may also want to make developments or upgrades or customizations later. And it will still be cheaper than for those who invented everything from scratch.
In the Shopify theme store, you will find that they have divided the themes themselves into categories. It can be categories of fashion, categories of jewelry, categories of food. They have done this to make it easier for people to find certain themes that they might see as popular in certain areas. It's important to say that this does not mean that you can not choose a theme that is supposedly in a food category for a fashion brand. It ultimately depends on what suits you.
And as you go through the themes look at the home page, look at the product page. Look at what these things look like, look at how these things behave. And this is how you will make the choice of the theme - according to the features that each theme has, and according to what it actually allows you to get at the design level.
Option 2: Hiring a Web Designer
The second approach is an approach that actually says I’m going to add another hat into my project today - a web designer. And then, I as a customer, and also I as a development company, I can say, we understand that there is now some activity here that is going to use more resources on your part as the store owners.
And it's also going to delay to some extent your launch to go live. Because we as a development company will not be able to start working until the design is received as a whole. And of course, it also has a lot of significant costs, and this too, we will not be able to estimate until we get the design in its entirety.
Mobile v Desktop
Of course, I’ll mention the issue of mobile versus desktop here, and again if we are going to build our store based on a template, then we will get it from Shopify, out of the box, in such a way that the site will be responsive on both mobile and desktop.
If we want to do something different and we want to hire an external designer, who will do a certain design for desktop and a certain design for mobile, then here we are once again starting to get a little involved. And again it's not that it's impossible, it's not impossible. It's relatively, even I would say, uncomplicated. But it's something to think about when you actually change the template, when you change the grid.
Graphic Designer v Web Designer
On this issue of changing the template, a lot of people tell me I have a graphic designer. I have a design. So I want to take a moment for you to note the difference of a design that changes the grid of the template. Meaning, now I take a whole section out of the template and add a unicorn that comes out of the screen. It will definitely need an external designer. It will definitely require a lot of work on the part of the designer.
Compared to when you talk about design “I have a design, I have a designer,” who in the end all he did was take a picture and put in some kind of logo or some particular font. And in this instance, as a development company, I am much less interested because in the end when I get the file from you, I get it as a file. It does not matter what is on it, on the picture. It also won't change here or there. So in this instance, when you talk about design - you need to make the distinction between graphic design, which is based on the materials or content you put on the site. Versus a graphic design, whose essence is really to produce a new grid for the template or modify the existing grid. And in these two instances, it's a world unto itself.
How Long Will it Take to Build my Site?
Important to know - the design has a very, very big impact on both the performance and the loading times of your site. The more complex and special the design, the more significant it will be, as I said, for loading time and regarding the user experience you want to make accessible to your customers.
This is a topic that is super super important when the user experience gets hurt because you want to see something visual that is very, very, very special. You might be undermining your goal of setting up a website that sells. And here you need to once again ask yourself the question and understand where the thin line is between the design and the user experience.
If you want to get more materials from us and if you have any further questions or would like us to talk about a particular topic, feel free to write to us (hi@boaideas.com), or to me personally (oren@boaideas.com).
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