Human eyes the most reliable sensory organ in the entire body because visual stimuli are given higher priority while observing or collecting information. Visual data ensures trust over the information we’re receiving, because of our reality which is built upon visualization. The mother nature’s elegance, beautiful girls, cute kids, etc., all are identified by their visual appearance, without which we would’ve treated a barren land and a beautiful garden the same.
The rule of visual importance from the real world also gets implemented in the internet world, the appearance of one’s website, web store, advertisement, can decide whether they’ll be reaching their success destination or going to suffer a severe crash landing. Having a good-looking website is a preliminary requirement, correct designing and efficient development can make a website selling socks look more beautiful than a website selling roses.
For the solution to this visual trouble, website owner/developers can purchase beautiful pre-built themes or templates. These themes have all the visual elements of a website already customized and optimized for best performance. Themes often come with the option to get further customized as per the requirements. Web sites are built upon various frameworks and platforms which require specific themes as per the compatibility. We’ll be discussing such a platform which allows its user to create and host an e-commerce store based on such themes.
The popular hosted eCommerce store platforms provide their stock themes (which are mostly free), and premium paid themes, which can be bought easily. As the popularity of this theme system grew broad, many independent companies also started making themes for such platforms and frameworks with additional services bundled with them to attract more customers. These additional services can include customization, integration, migration, etc. of the client’s website.
There are some technical evaluation points which everyone should keep in mind before purchasing or choosing a theme for your web store
Page Loading Time (how long does the site take to load?)
The average loading time for your website’s web pages should always be around 2 seconds, anything longer than that will result in slow crawling of the website’s pages which will impact indexing of newly added web pages or content for the Google search result. Hence, it is recommended to compress your images, compress coding elements. You can test your website’s loading speed with so many free tools available in the market like Google Speed Test Tool, GTmetrix.
Sometimes even after following the tips as mentioned earlier, your website might not perform that well, and the last option you’re left with is to perform customization to your website. Customization is not possible with the stock themes from the BigCommerce Theme store, but the third party theme store offers customization option allowing you to enhance the website loading speed further.
Responsiveness (how does your site look on different devices?)
Responsiveness has no relation with the responses from your links, pages or some functionality. The flexibility of the website which allows satisfactory browsing experience on any device that supports website browsing is known as the responsive internet site. Responsiveness has gained a lot of importance lately as operating systems like Android and IOS has taken over the market, if your web page is not responsive, you might lose several potential future customers and Google organic ranking on your business targeted keyword.
Responsiveness is partially dependent upon the platform, or the framework is built upon and partially dependent upon how it’s built (the layout and design). You cannot customize the framework, but the website can be customized, hence by opting for a third party theme you make yourself available with the option to perform further responsiveness related changes to your website. The customizability affects a lot as you can get desired results as per your requirements.
Design Layout ( how easy is the navigation of the website on mobile and full versions of the site?)
Just like no one likes paths which are confusing and distracting, your customers and clients would not like to navigate through your confusing and distracting website. The people of today are looking for ease and luxury, anything which demands work from them receives less likeliness and respect. The most popular mobile operating system, IOS from Apple is not widely used because of its technological advancement but due to its simplicity in delivering the technological advancement.
As mentioned above third party themes store gives customizability service option, allowing the theme owner to apply changes to those aspects of the website which can effectively enhance the performance and appearance of the website. The most customizable element of a website is its visual elements which concern with the users and clients’ direct interaction. Making your design appealing and easy to be interpreted by the customers can boost your visitor and conversion rates.
If we compare platform store Vs Third party store for BigCommerce framework
There’s more than just technical aspects supporting the act of considering a third party BigCommerce Theme. Financial factors, implementational factors, practicality, etc. also play quite a crucial role in deciding the perfect theme for your store.Below we are going to discuss some of the very factors justifying the adoption of third party BigCommerce themes over a platform theme stock store.
1. Expensive default templates: The templates provided by BigCommerce on their official theme store are quite expensive. For an enterprise, these small margins won’t make any difference but if you’re just starting off your journey in the e-commerce world than saving a little can benefit you a lot. Hence considering a third party theme according to your needs is highly recommended.
2. Very Few Options To Choose From: BigCommerce does offer a theme store with various themes to choose from, but the number of themes made available is very less. Users struggle to find the perfect one, and most settle for customizing some generic one. Hence you select what you like from third party BigCommerce Themes.
You may also like: Top 4 Best Selling Bigcommerce Stencil Themes
3. BigCommerce default templates are everywhere: Due to the ease of access most BigCommerce clients use the stock themes from the default theme store, which has resulted in making most of the stores look similar. Opting a third party theme will make your store stand out in the crowd and further make it unique by utilizing their customization services.
4. Help comes the last: BigCommerce is a huge platform serving more than 99,698 stores to maintain their online presence and serve their customers. And getting customer support from them is not that easy task, you have to go through their vigorous ticketing system to get in touch with one of their experts, this is never the case with 3rd party BigCommerce Themes as each customer gets exclusive treatment.
So you must be thinking of where can I find such third-party template provider. Am I right? There are so many third party themes provider available in the market like ThemeMonter, Themevale, PSDCenter, etc. But we suggest, amongst them, PSDCenter is the only provider, who is having reach experience in BigCommerce theme development and they are certified BigCommerce partners. PSDCenter is serving more than 300+ client in BigCommerce framework. You can also check BigCommerce premium themes available on PSDCenter’s theme store.
Written byPublished September 04, 2017
Anisha Bhandari