Friday, September 13, 2013

Our New and Old Website Designs for Our Homemade Luxury Soap Store - Ginger Grey Soaps

 Ginger Grey Soaps 
Online Store


This was our first design of our handmade soap store.  We use Big Cartel and like how it's not too hard to customize the templates they have.  I wish there were more templates to use, but so far I like it and I like their monthly pricing compared to Etsy which can get pretty pricey the more you sell.  At first I really liked the black background I chose and the collage of pictures but as time went on, I thought we needed to brighten it up a bit and ditch the black.  It was too dark.  I also didn't like how all of the links were in long columns on the bottom of the page and the top only showcased 2 of my page categories and not all of them.  I thought that might be confusing to buyers who may not realize we had more than two categories, unless they scrolled to the bottom.


This was our second design.  I liked this better, as it was brighter and more cheery and the product categories were in a column on the side which made it easier to navigate.  At first, I really liked the brighter choice of colors and the flower at the top, but it began to wear on me.  It just wasn't working and I saw another website online that had a slideshow on the home page and it really caught my attention.  I really liked how you could showcase your favorite products with text, at all times instead of a bunch of random pics like I had in this design.  So, I was off to change it again. 
 

This time, I purchased a template design by Tonka Park which was very affordable and I loved the slideshow design they had. It's specifically for a Big Cartel store.  I thought it would be fairly easy to customize it, but there wasn't a whole lot I could do with the basic layout once I purchased it.  I had to customize it a ton to get the look I wanted.  Either I could pay them to do the customizations or I could figure it out myself and learn a lot in the process.  I chose the latter and did tons of Google searching and learned how to customize the CSS and html portions of the site and really make it my own.  It was a lot of work, but I have some new skills!  So, I currently like the new look of the store much better than the previous ones.  It's bright and cheery and immediately showcases our products.  However, I'm sure there will be more tweaking in the future as we continue to grow and change.  What do you think of our new store?  Go check it out at www.gingergreysoaps.com .  I'd love to hear what you think and how user friendly it is.  Thanks for stopping by!

Melissa

also on Etsy


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