After considering the difference between free and premium Magento 2 theme for your website, you should make a decision. If you are serious about doing business, we highly recommend you going for the carefully-designed paid theme.
Besides good technical and support, the first thing to consider in choosing website theme for your store is the design.
Remember: people judge a book by its cover, your users judge your business by its theme, and you definitely should judge a theme by its design.
But what aspects of design should you judge when it comes to website theme?
In this article, we present 3 critical elements of a premium website design in a Magento 2 store: clear visual hierarchy, consistent color, suitable font.
A theme having all these 3 design elements can assure the aesthetic aspect of your website. And a beautiful website helps communicate the quality of the brand, improve the visibility of marketing campaigns, make the foundation for increasing conversion rate and emphasize all the messages you want to broadcast.
Table of Contents
1. Clear visual hierarchy
The purpose of design is to communicate the message visually. However, whether the message is communicated successfully or not depends on the navigation of the information.
An organized hierarchical can guide website visitors to follow the flow of the story you are telling.
Visual hierarchy refers to the arrangement or presentation of elements of information in a way that implies importance.
With a website designed with clear visual hierarchy, the users visiting your site can find and understand the most important message you want to communicate. Consider 2 pages below:
Which one do you think is more understandable?
It is clearly the page on the right, which provides a way to catch the key information. In order to understand the left page, users have to read each sentence one-by-one to catch the idea.
In the context of flooding information on the internet, contents are abundant that users even develop banner blindness.
Even if you have very good products and value proposition, a rock-solid message but your website design does not follow the page on the left above, users would just ignore your effort.
They would not hesitate to hit that “comfortable back button”.
As you can see, visual hierarchy system helps prioritizes the content of websites.
In Website design, a good visual hierarchy system means clearly discriminate the importance of the contents of a website page.
This can be achieved by setting up the contrasting colors, a large difference in font size, or line spacing. with the use of font of the text element or images.
When considering website design, you can try this visual hierarchy test: zoom out to 50% (by holding CTRL + mouse scroll down), have 3 seconds to look at the design then look away.
If then you cannot tell what the website is about, the website is bad in term of visual hierarchy.
A website that is bad in visual hierarchy, you cannot expect your users to understand what you are trying to tell. So a rule of thumb when choosing a Magento 2 website theme design is: go for the ones that are easy to understand hierarchically.
2. Consistent color
Color is one of the most visual aesthetic aspects that easily affects human’s emotion in an immediate way.
Image credit: thelogocompany.net
People would perceive brand personality differently when it associates with different colors. That’s why there are some colors that are very commonly used in certain industries.
For example, in the restaurant industry, the most used color for the logo is red, to trigger energy and even feelings of hunger.
Image credit: visualcapitalist.com
However, in the communication industry, the color dominates logos is blue, as it conveys clear thinking and communicating.
Image credit: visualcapitalist.com
In branding, the brand color helps customers memorize the brand, including its name, industry, products, and attributes. There is no exception to this rule, whether the (potential) customer interacts with the brand via offline or online stores. According to Kissmetrics:
85% of shoppers place color as a primary reason for why they buy a particular product
Color increases brand recognition by 80%. Brand recognition directly links to consumer confidence.
The Magento 2 website design color, therefore, needs to be consistent for users to easily recognize the familiar brand, making the more purchase in less amount of time.
At its best practice, an Magento 2 website design should follow a color palette.
You can learn to create your own color palette here. If you have already had a primary color, you can consider adding colors to different elements of your website using Adobe’s free Color CC.
After that, you would want to change the color of multiple elements of the theme to the colors in your color palette. For example, you would want to configure the color of some texts, buttons like below:
Technically, in this section, the theme that you can configure many elements color wins. These elements can be text color, background color, and button color.
So in order to get the best out of the brand’s color, go for a theme that you can configure many elements’ color.
3. Suitable font
When choosing website design, font choice should be considered seriously. Poor font choice results in an unprofessional website.
In the 3 examples above, website owners make terrible choices in selecting fonts.
The font usage of the left one conflicts in both colors and angles, with dense paragraph line spacing, minimize the desire to read the paragraph.
The font usage of the middle one is misleading, as the header and body font have the same weight and typeface. The font is the default Times New Roman, which makes the website looks dull and extremely amateur.
The font usage of the right one is in its clarity. All elements are way too small to be readable.
So what makes a good font choice?
If you have had your fonts determined in your brand guidelines, congratulations. Just follow it.
However, if you have not determined the font for your brand, you need to know the font types.
Font Types
There are 4 most basic font types: Serif, Sans Serif, Script, and Decorative. Each type of font conveys different font characteristic. You have to choose website design which supports the font suitable for your business.
Among 4 font types, Serif and Sans Serif fonts are commonly used due to its simplicity. In website design, using Script and Decorative as elements’ font would be too hard to read.
Image Credit: fonts.com (Serif: left, Sans Serif: right)
Sans Serif fonts give a sense of youth and active. On the other hand, Serif fonts create a feeling of maturity, classic.
Given that, businesses that target young people often use Sans Serif:
In contrast, high-end ones commonly use Serif:
Construction and real estate business makes great use of Bold Sans Serif for a solid, sustainable sense:
On the other hand, women-oriented brands eager on slim sharp Serif font:
Font conflict
You should keep your website design’s font number low. In fact, in the design world, there’s a golden rule that is rarely be crossed: no more than 3 fonts in 1 design.
In fact, you can just have just 1 font, with different font style, size, and color that can clearly communicate the message while retaining consistency of the font.
You should also note that the heading font should stand out, while paragraph font needs cohesion.
In choosing the website design, a theme should have font configuration options. You should be able to choose the main font that matches your business brand or industry. The paragraph and headings font size should be dramatically different.
Choosing best premium theme design for Magento 2 website: in conclusion,
The first thing to consider when buying a theme for Magento 2 website is the design. We have discussed in depth 3 critical elements of a premium website design that you should pay attention: clear visual hierarchy, consistent color, suitable font.
Choosing themes that has the design that has all 3 elements guarantees you an aesthetic and practical design at the same time. Your website can and should be both beautiful and able to convert.
However, a beautiful theme without configurability, function and full of bug cost both a great deal of time and money. The next step in considering the theme is checking the theme’s technical aspect.
Do you think there are other important elements that should be included? Any elements you want to add more details? Let us know your opinion in the comment below.