Book launch: “The Fashion Designer’s Guide: Creating Fashion Websites that Sell” by Syama Meagher and Nicole Giordano. We’ve interviewed Syama about the new book and her years of experience in the fashion industry.
With the rapid growth of e-Commerce, Syama and Nicole noticed that their clients and community kept asking the same questions that made them wonder…
“Why isn’t there a one-stop-shop for all of these answers”?
This question resulted in her new book (*LAUNCHING TODAY), “The Fashion Designer’s Guide: Creating Fashion Websites that Sell“, co-authored by Nicole Giordano, founder of StartUp FASHION. This book is meant to be THAT step-by-step manual with all the answers for eCommerce success.
It will make you ask yourself:
- What is my brand identity?
- What is my customer’s identity?
- What do I want my website to say?
- How will I establish credibility?
You will also learn (or freshen up on) concepts regarding designing and building a professional website, building pages that sell, the importance of branding, content marketing, and much more.
So go, add “The Fashion Designer’s Guide: Creating Fashion Websites that Sell” to your shopping cart, and checkout. You won’t regret it.
“The Fashion Designer’s Guide: Creating Fashion Websites that Sell“
By Nicole Giordano & Syama Meagher
Available TODAY – Get it here!
The care and quality you put into your website is a direct reflection of the care and quality you put into your collection.
P.S. If you want to pick the brains of other emerging designers and brands, stop by StartUp FASHION, an online community for industry networking.
HAPPY SHOPPING!
[Learn about “The Importance of Brick and Mortar Shops for Online Retailers“. For more tech & biz articles, click here!]
Read the full interview transcription below:
- What will I find in this book?
The Fashion Designer’s Guide to Creating Fashion Websites that Sell is the culmination of years and years of consulting emerging market, from small to medium size, fashion brands. These companies have common questions, like “How do I launch properly?”, “What should I do?”, and in this book Nicole Giordano and I take our time to explain all the best practices on how to launch your website today.
- When designing and building my website, how should I decide if I want to use a template or build a custom website?
When it comes to starting your website, it’s super important to figure out what your budget is. Some people will not have the budget to outsource and get someone to design and build their website from scratch. That doesn’t mean that you can’t have a really awesome website. So if you are going to go the template route, know that there are ways of making it look amazing. But, if you do have the extra cash to spend on getting someone to do something custom, you are going to see huge benefits in that.
- What is the importance of a homepage and what designs are currently trending?
Your homepage is your eyes and ears of your brand. It is there to capture and captivate all of the amazing new customers that you can potentially have. The biggest trend right now is creating dynamic homepages. Homepages that are living, breathing, that change every two or three weeks, that give you a real updated look and feel of what’s going on in that brand’s world. And nowadays you’re seeing brands add things like their press to their homepages. They’re adding their Instagram feeds, they’re adding the events that they’re at. It’s no longer just a static image, and it’s no longer just Flash either.
- Where should I start when developing my brand?
Research your competitors! Taking a look and seeing what’s out there is the number one best way of figuring out who you are and more importantly who you’re not. It’s super important to see, if you’re starting your own brand, “where can I potentially be sold?” and how do you come to those answers… Well, you take a look at your competitors. That’s how you can see “I like this logo, I don’t like this logo”, “I love these colors and layouts or I don’t”. I always suggest that everyone start with an excel spreadsheet and a lot of research.
- Where should the about page live on my website?
About pages are kind of tricky. Customers always want to be able to find out more about you, but you don’t necessarily need to scream it or put it so front and center. I’d really think about what it is that your brand stands for. Are you the designer of your brand? Do you have a retail shop? The “about” section needs to be appropriately placed. My two favorite areas are obviously, for small businesses where it’s really about that one-on-one connection, to put your about page up at the top navi; If you are a larger brand, or you’re looking to do something that’s a bit more, you know – multi-categorical style, then put your about page down below the bottom footer.
- What do you see as the future of product pages?
Product pages are my favorite because that really gives you an opportunity to sell like no other, your brand. Nowadays product pages have the opportunity to carry so much information. If you aren’t taking advantage of the tabs that you can use on your copy, you’re not taking advantage of related products or suggested products, then you’re really doing yourself a disservice. As technology scales and becomes more accessible, you’re going to see smaller brands being able to do 360 images really quickly, you’re going to be able to see more and more video go up on product pages, and hopefully, maybe one day, you’re going to start to see opportunities to virtually try things on from those product pages.
- How important is a blog for an eCommerce website?
I like to equate blog with really the concept of brand communication because that’s really what a blog is. So when it comes to thinking about social media and blogging for your brand, it’s really important to think about “what is the messaging that I’m putting forward”. If you don’t have a lot of bandwidth and you can only focus on a couple different platforms to communicate your brand, then maybe as opposed to having a blog section, you’re really pulling in your Instagram or your Facebook feeds, so that people get an idea of what your brand is about. If you have the time, and your point of view, and editorial perspective is really exciting, and people come to you because maybe you’re a stylist or someone with a unique perspective, then yes, writing a blog is going to be crucial for you. And by the way, having a blog is also another fabulous way of having search engine optimization.
- If someone put your book in their cart but is hesitating to checkout, what would you say to entice them?
I’d tell them this book will make you a million bucks, but I could be lying. So instead what I’d say is, if you’re frustrated with building your site, if you want to look like your site is legitimate, even if you have a website and you’re trying to figure out what are the things you can do to change it to really make and impact – this book is simple, easy to read, and will give you all of those answers.
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