Let’s Build A House
I often find myself speaking with smart people who haven’t a clue about the intricacies of digital commerce. These are the conversations I love the most – it’s not only an opportunity to share my knowledge and passion about ecommerce, it’s also an opportunity to get someone as excited about its possibilities as I am.
Putting complex things into layman’s terms isn’t always easy, but I like to use an analogy of building a house because it’s a tangible concept people get.
This is how it starts:
Before you build a house, you need land to build it on, which will also determine its address. If you’re going to build a website, you need a hosting provider, which is your virtual land, and a URL, which is your virtual address. You get these from domain and hosting providers such as GoDaddy, Squarespace, Wix, Bluehost, and many others.
Be prepared to do research for a hosting provider and website builder that meets your businesses’ specific needs. Although many come with “easy” and “free” website builders, keep in mind that there will still be some level of technical expertise required, and that “free” also means “limited”.
Once you’ve got your land and your address for your house, you’ll need to hire an architect to draw up plans which will be based on all of the things you want and need in your house, as well as a general contractor to run the project to build it. In the digital world, you’ll hire a developer or a development firm that will document all of your business requirements for your website, “frame” out your site pages, and then build your site. Even though you may work with one person or company, they will need to have a variety of expertise.
There are lots of specialists involved in building your house – plumbers, electricians, HVAC, carpenters, painters, the list goes on. You wouldn’t have the electrician doing the plumbing, and the plumbers putting on the roof. The same is true for building a website – you need people who have expertise in user experience (UX) and user interface (UI) design, which will determine how easily visitors can navigate throughout your site, as well as coders and creative designers. The difference between the person who designs the user interface and the actual creative designer is not subtle – the UI designer takes technical requirements and translates them into frictionless customer flows and understands coding; the creative designer applies the brand’s identity to the UI to make it visually appealing to your visitors.
Wireframes are the developer’s equivalent of blueprints – they show the outline of the website’s pages including the features and functionality. In order to truly get an understanding of how the website will look to your visitors, a designer will take the wireframes and turn them into mockups.
Today, there are so many options for start-ups and small businesses to launch an ecommerce site leveraging templates and WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editors. SaaS platforms like Shopify/Shopify Plus and Big Commerce, as well as ecommerce plug-ins for content platforms like WordPress, Wix, Squarespace, and hosting provider website builders tools make building an ecommerce site much easier. However, as I mentioned above, these solutions all still require some level of technical and ecommerce expertise.
Finding the right platform and company to build your ecommerce site can be daunting, especially if you lack digital commerce expertise in your organization. You don’t have to do it alone. Let us put our 20+ years’ experience to work for you!
