Product oriented websites

 

What is a product oriented website?

A product oriented website is any website that showcases products. It could be large industrial machinery, a pair of headphones or a bunch of bananas.

A product oriented website is contrasted to a service oriented website such as professional services websites.

Although products are visible and therefore easier to understand than services, the difference between similar products isn’t so easy to appreciate without further clues such as branding and descriptions.

Product-oriented websites should be visually interesting and descriptive so that people can understand, differentiate and appreciate the products on offer.

The objectives of a product oriented website

• Show visuals of product
• Help clients understand the product
• Show important details about a product
• Explain product range
• Drive person to enquire, buy or take another action

Product oriented website design

Product management sytems

Before you settle upon a website technology like WordPress or Shopify, you should make sure you are comfortable with the software you’ll need to manage your products. Some systems will be easier to adapt to your requirements, some systems will be easier to use. There is usually a tradeoff between ease of use and functional capabilities

Product Photography

For most product oriented websites, product photography is central to the design. You will need several types of photos including:

• Mood photos
• Product shots
• Product in-use shots

 

Deal with photography at the soonest

When developing a new website, product photos may be in short supply and will slow down the launch of a website if not tackled right from the get go.

Building up a good library of photos will give your designer the freedom the create the best possible layouts.

Photo Consistency

The entire website needs to ensure brand consistency. This means that photos need to be taken to the same standard and with the same level of professionalism.

Ensure that backgrounds, lighting, image quality, photography angles are more or less the same.

Photos can be corrected and edited to ensure a consistent feel.

Template design or custom design

Design templates

For ecommerce websites, we recommend a template or themed design. These are pre-designed templates that you choose to apply website. This will speed up the project and ensure you follow the standard rules of ecommerce user experience design.

Custom designs

For a product oriented website that isn’t selling , you have a little more to think about. You may find a template design too restrictive. A custom layout will help you describe your product in a more natural way.

Custom templates

If you have lots of custom products that don’t follow a predesigned theme, then you’ll need to create a custom template that you can use for all your products.

 

Digital Marketing and SEO

There are two main strategies – promoting your brand and making your products findable. If you can differentiate yourself, veer more towards branding. If your product is more generic, veer towards SEO.

In most cases you need to do both push and pull marketing strategies.

Product Keyword Research

How you title your products makes a big difference as to how it’s found.

Each product should be titled the way users search for it. If people search by brand name, the brand name needs to be mentioned.

For example for Heat Transfer Vinyl:

• Metallic HTV Vinyl
• Heat Transfer Vinyl
• Siser HTV
• Siser Metallic Heat Transfer Vinyl

These can all refer to the same project. People will search for some terms more than others and your competition will list their version of the product a certain way.

You need to decide what keywords you want to use on your website based on what people search for but also what keywords your competition are using. Will you use the same keywords and compete directly or will you use alternative versions and compete indirectly?

Brand awareness

Whatever you’re selling, be it large industrial widget makers or cute cuddly toys, people need to know you exist. Then they need to know what do. This process can be quick or it can take years.

Bear in mind brand awareness strategies when you are marketing your products.

Smaller companies  may find this task more difficult because of limited budgets but the principle still applies. Fortunately, you can start with smaller budget-friendly brand building activities such as Facebook Ads.

The difficult will be building enough relevance to enough people for this strategy to pay off – which is why smaller companies prefer to use Search Engine Marketing and Search Engine Optimization to find new clients for their products.