Optimised web design: make browsing a breeze

Big. Bold. Dominant. These dramatic shots are often used for social media posts, marketing campaigns or headers on your website to draw customers in. This style of image combines the visual features of your product with short and engaging text to encourage users to find out more.

 

Simple product photos with plain white backgrounds and minimal distractions allow users to visualise how they might use your product. This style of photography is ideal for almost all product pages and can be found on most ecommerce websites. 


 

GIFs or videos are a great way to display a product in action and can create visual clarity for users. They also allow for a more immersive experience and encourage user engagement with the product.
GIFs and videos have also been statistically proven to increase sales.

 

Lifestyle photos feature your product in a styled scene to demonstrate to your customers how to use your product and demonstrate what makes your product special. This also gives you the opportunity to associate your products with a certain lifestyle to enhance their appeal to your website visitors. Lifestyle product photos are ideal for displaying decorative products or jewellery. 
 

This relatively new style of product display allows customers to move or spin the image to get a complete view of the item, creating a more immersive experience. 360-degree images are created using a fusion of software and sequence of panoramic photos, lined up to make a sustained circle around the point of shooting. These photographs are popular for displaying furniture, household appliances and shoes.

One of the biggest challenges with ecommerce sites is that a customer can’t see or touch your products. This is why it’s imperative that you show off your products from different angles to give customers a good idea of what your product is like. 

Including zoomed-in images or offering a zoom function on your photographs can allow customers to see the textures and patterns on your products. 

If your product comes in multiple colours, make sure to photograph all of the colour options. Doing so can help to create a more immersive customer experience and can improve your chances of making a sale. 

Where possible, it’s always beneficial to show how your products look in context. For example, showing how a particular dress may look on a size 10 and a size 18 model, or a vase on both a plain surface and within a room sitting on a shelf. 

Tools you can use include Pen tool in Adobe Photoshop and Photoshop’s Quick Selection tool (‘Select and Mask’). White backgrounds are an industry standard, and for a good reason: they remove the potential for distractions and direct focus towards your product. Also, they typically make for smaller file sizes, which can improve your website page loading speed. 

Tools you can use include Photoshop’s Clone Stamp tool and the Healing Brush tool. Removing blemishes or smudges from your product images can keep them looking neat and professional.

 

Colour correcting your images by increasing the contrast will make your product even more prominent against the background. Editing photos in this way can also allow you to produce consistent imagery across your ecommerce site, reinforcing your brand. 

If you’re tight on time and resources, there are plenty of free and affordable online tools available for easy photo editing. So, no matter the size of your store, you can offer your customers informative and professional product images.

As this is a product page, this is a place for it to shine. Depending on what you are selling determines how it is presented.

 

Who are you targeting? Who is buying your products? Who are you speaking to? Answering these questions will help you shape your product page and the content you should be writing. Short and snappy? Informative and lots of detail? Videos or GIFs?

When creating your product page, consider how content is arranged and what is or is not included within it. These aspects can ultimately have a huge impact on your conversions.
 

It’s vital that your branding is displayed across your product pages. Due to the very nature of online shopping, a customer might never land on your homepage, but this ensures they will see your brand. 
 

Your brand’s tone-of-voice guide should determine or certainly help with your copywriting. In this case, the copy used to describe your product should be written in a way that matches your brand.
 

This is the most popular template used for online product pages. The main elements are above the fold, with the product description and ‘call to action’ (CTA) placed alongside the main images.

An image-focused design is perfect for showing your products and making them the centre of attention. However, it’s important to still include your product description, price and CTA above the fold.

Featured focused 

This is ideal for focusing on the features of your product rather than how it looks. This style is often used for tech or digital appliances. In this case, the product description should outline the main features and technical specifications to stand out to the customer.