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Custom Online Store Designs- Having a custom online store designed for you can be confusing if you don’t know what you want. This custom online store design tutorial will help you choose the best custom store design for you! Custom online store designs!

Custom store designs for eCommerce sites contrast with sites built using templates. Store designs can take several different forms, and include a variety of customizations, which are explained in this article.

Three Main Custom Store Design Choices

There used to be only two ways to make a custom store design or a custom website design of any kind: either you or one of your employees made your own or you hired someone else, most likely a web designer, to make one for you. Times have changed, and it is now possible to find highly customizable templates, not the templates that stick you with a generic banner and colors and number of columns, but templates that can be pretty much stripped down to nothing and built back up again to the point that it’s not recognizable as a template any more.

Adapting a Template

The type of template that is broadly adaptable generally advertises this desirable feature. One example is the Thesis template for WordPress. Did you think WordPress was only for blogs? With the Thesis theme and an eCommerce plugin, you can build a custom store design and get support along the way for far less than it would cost to hire a custom designer, as long as you or someone in your organization is comfortable and skilled with technology and design.

If you are considering adapting a different kind of template, here are some items to check before you get started:

• First Question: Can you change it enough so it will not be recognizable as a template?
• eCommerce-enabled: Was it built for eCommerce? Can it connect to a database, showcase products, interface with a shopping cart?
• Columns: If it doesn’t have the number you want, make sure you can change it. If you want different numbers of columns on different pages, make sure that facility is built in.
• Pages/Products: Some templates have page or product limits. If it does, consider whether at some point you’re going to have to port your entire website to a new template or rebuild from scratch.
• Banner: Can you use your own logo? Can you change the colors, size, and shape?
• Size: Was the template built to adapt well for users who are high tech and have large monitors or users who are low tech and have small monitors? Which category are your customers in?
• Navigation: Are there built in limits to the number of menu items you can have? If so, will they work for you? Will they still work five years from now?
• Multimedia: Can you display multimedia?
• Plug-ins: Can you use plug-ins?
• Mobile: Is it possible to easily create mobile versions if you need to reach customers on mobile devices?
• Browser Friendly: Is it compatible with the latest browsers?
• Accessibility: Is it built to handle the Alliance for Technology Access accessibility guidelines?

Custom Store Design- In House or For Hire

Whether done in house or as work for hire, custom web design allows you to spec your site from the ground up in the context of expert advice. While it generally costs more than other options, custom store design gives you a great deal of freedom and control. In partnership with your designer, you have control over branding, color scheme, columns, pages, layout, etc. You can find a designer who will allow you to be very hands-on or to whom you can say, "Give me some samples" and use what you get as a jumping-off point.

Using custom store design makes it easy to have a site with both static and dynamic pages, and to have the site respond to the user in a variety of ways. When you start from scratch, the ability to grow can be built into the design, for example, by allowing for future changes in navigation, number of products, addition of a blog, etc. In addition, a specially built back-end can customize site maintenance to fit your particular needs, and any qualified designer will make sure that your site is compatible with the latest browsers and built to meet accessibility guidelines.

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