Maintaining An Attractive Store Front

The topic of maintaining an attractive store front is often on the mind of retail business owners, whether manning a physical retail location or one on the internet. An attractive store front is what brings potential customers in off the street, or information highways, to take a look at what you have for sale.

An attractive store front will be arranged in such a way that it is pleasing to the eye, as well as incorporates various items that are most commonly sought. In this way you will be able to attract peoples’ attention. Without a nice looking store front, you won’t be offering anything to pique passers’ curiosity. Even the tiniest, thoughtful additions to store fronts can make all the difference when it comes to the curiosity aspect.

One of the things that keeps customers, new and returning, coming in to your store is variety. The store front is no different. Your store front displays should change regularly so that customers feel that there is something new and interesting within the store. By rotating the store front display you can show off your latest, most popular merchandise.

Now let’s talk a little about online store fronts. There is really little difference between the use and purpose of a store front on the internet than one that is a traditional physical retail location. Probably the main difference is that it’s much easier to accomplish big changes in your store front display when your store front is on an internet website. That’s not to say that it is easy, but with a little bit of research and/or professional web design help, you will be able to set up fully automated store front changes that occur according to the schedule you define.

Probably the simplest way to make your website look different to your visitors from visit to visit is to incorporate a banner or other image section that rotates to display random images from a directory of your choosing. This is how advertising banners are served, but it can also be done with your own store images. For example, have a rotating image section that displays highlights of your different store categories.

Another way to keep your store front attractive to visitors is to allow them the freedom to change the appearcne of the store front themselves. For example, you can install skins on your website that users can select in order to easily change the colors, fonts and such with a single click. With the addition of browser cookies, the users’ settings will be stored in his/her computer and recalled each time they visit your site. Since you can’t design for every type of aesthetic taste, the user defined style system is a good way to go.

If you’re on a smaller budget and don’t have the time to learn web design, there are some helpful suites of ready-to-go dynamic websites that are open source. These huge projects, such as Wordpress, Drupal, PhpBB, etc. have comprehensive codex sites, mods and plugins that you can use to effect the high-tech website you’d like to have as your interne store front.

And if you still need some help designing your site, try out one of the very handy freelance services on the internet. Places such as rentacoder.com and scriptlance.com allow you to place a bid request. Just detail your project and you will get bids from prospective designers. This can be a great way to get projects done without spending a great deal of time and money.

Deon Melchior is the Editor and Publisher of Article Click. For more FREE articles for your ezine and websites visit ArticleClick.com. Article Click is a free content article directory. This means that as a publisher you may reprint the articles that are included in our site, as long as the article is unedited and the author box is included with it's live hyperlinks.