Nowadays all the businesses around the world are transforming the way they approach people by transitioning to online platforms. Covid-19 has taught us the new norm of online shopping.

However the challenges for transforming your business from traditional to digital is not an easy process. Before that, lets deep dive on the difference between traditional business & online business.

This is a guide for you to understand what is the essential for online business & what can be done later.

Branding

With traditional business, branding is not a priority. The main objectives of a brand is to  build trust through identity appearance consistency of the business. The more consistent it appear, the faster people will recognise & remember it as a trusted brand. We often wonder why its not a priority for traditional business?

Traditional business is more focusing on walk-in customer. The customer is certain that the business exist because the shop is physically there. However, this is not the case with digital / online business.

In order to make a shift to the digital space, you must also shift the traditional approach mindset to digital business mindset.

The approach to go digital / online is to have a good looking identity instead of good looking stores / shop on traditional approach. Be it the social media posting, website design, mobile apps color & icons, youtube thumbnails & etc. This is to serve the purpose of being consistent & looking professional to deliver a message that we are being serious with our business.

Branding is what you need to take care all of the element mentioned above. With any branding design services, there are 2 phases. 1st is for starting your business which is brand identity. 2nd is for scaling your business, which is brand strategy.

UI/UX Design

After the branding have been settled. You will need either a website or a mobile apps. This is a platform for you to close a sales, answering frequently ask question, for customer / client to find out what people say about your brand, etc.

A website / mobile apps can be design however we want to meet the user expectation, user friendly to use and also meet the user objective using the website / mobile apps, this needs a UI/UX Design.

Simply put, UI Design is the aesthetics look of your website / mobile apps. UX Design on the other hand is to put ourselves on user shoes.

- Does it met their expectation?
- Does is very easy to use without any guidance?
- Do they find what they are looking for?
- Do we answer their question upfront, before they even think about it?
- Every aspect about the pleasant of going through the website / mobile apps is known as UX Design (User Experience Design).

Web / App Development

Finally its time to build our digital platform. With our brand & UI/UX are ready, its time for us build our internet shop. On the Branding phase, we have prepared the business identity:
- how it speaks
- how it looks (remember the M from Mcdonald’s logo?)
- how it smell (remember KFC or Starbucks smell?)
- how it sound
- etc.

From all of this combined with UI/UX Design, then the business should be ready to be develop as a website / mobile apps platform. The analogy of UI/UX could be like the blueprint before we build our online shop.