osCommerce Design matches target audience
Before starting an online business, or any business at all, one should carefully study the market, define target audience and study it too. So that products would be interested to the prospect customers, so that the prices would look reasonable to the target audience customers, so that every advertisement campaign would reach the desired target group of people.
Therefore design of an online store should “match” the supposed target audience. It should look somehow attractive to the prospect customers. It should somehow correspond to the life style of the prospect customers. Of course it’s a little bit mixed up with the design matching the product range. But if we look closely into it, we will obviously see that products themselves will always “match” the target audience – as otherwise the online store would not reach desired sales targets. So there’s no any problem in the online store’s design matching both products and target audience.
If an online store is dedicated to, for example, products for families – its design will most probably have all soft and round design elements, soft and clean font style, will include some photographs of happy families, etc. Even if that online store sells the latest video games – its design will stay the same, to make it attractive to those parents who would like to buy those video games to their children.
An online store that sells younger kids-oriented products (including products like merchandise, apparel, shoes, toys, games, even confectionery) will most probably be designed in a fun style, with lots of bright design elements, funny page-mates, and of course photographs of happy children, so that both kids and their parents
would be pleased to see that web site – as the process of choosing products online will most likely involve them together.
Yet another example would be an online store intended to sell its products to those who take sports seriously. Design of such web site will be more active, bright, even sometimes it can be a bit aggressive. It can be made resembling the spirit of exercise, strength, competition. And if it offers a big range of products, some of them may not be 100% related to the sports – like casual clothes, but nevertheless the style of the whole web site will be delivering corresponding “message” to its target customers.
One more important detail in choosing design of an online store is the default font size. Quite often online store owners or web designers forget about the importance of all the content being easy readable by the prospect customers for sake of nice looking pages. Yet without being able to read the information displayed on the page, or with having any difficulties reading it – the customer will more likely not complete the purchase process and leave the online store.
There exist a lot of online businesses where their target audience includes mostly people of middle age and older ones. Therefore bigger font size should be used by default to guarantee the prospect customers will not experience any issues reading any text on the web site.
Of course design of the web site should be made in a way that allows customers changing font sizes using facilities of their web browsers, and so that the web site still looks as good as possible with either default font size. Also, in some countries and regions there exist certain legal regulations that determine how the web sites should be built to allow people with sight problems using those web sites anyway.