Building an e-commerce website to showcase and sell a baby product

Before its complete redesign and rebuild, this web site was in need of a professional upgrade Using a free template from a hosting provider, the problems that needed to be fixed included the following (and the before and after shots will say more than a thousand words about this too!):

Site navigation was lost when visitors went to the e-commerce area (e-commerce was on another domain – a huge pet peeve of mine!)

Design offered by this free template was lacking.

Value was not being demonstrated well, and layout and design had a lot to do with this. This company has a very good product that customers love once they get it into their hands, but the web site was not doing it justice, and not conveying the quality in the brand.

Text formatting and images were all over the place and not consistent.

SEO was non-existent.

Aside from having its own background colour, the logo was not conveying the value of the brand well enough. This was also addressed in the marketing plan we did beforehand.

Photo quality needed to be of a higher calibre.

The Twitter and Facebook buttons were off. Twitter was a text link and positioned up against the Facebook button.

Some content had to be added in as an image, making it impossible for search engines to read or for viewers to zoom in.

The email form had its own background colour and was not inviting. That might have been discouraging to otherwise interested parties.

The list of stores was a long scroll and needed to be organized into an easier-to-navigate format.

Have a look at the photos below, it’ll show you everything! (tip, click on the thumbnails to open up the lightbox slideshow)

Click one of the images to open up a slideshow!

So what did we do to improve this web site?

Well, first we did a marketing plan, and identified the core brand attributes of the company and specifically its products. Through that, we discovered that the brand look needed to be softer, and that a new logo was overdue. We also did a market research survey and found out the hot buttons that affected the company’s target market (moms who cared about being natural). That determined how a lot of content was going to be written for all the marketing material.

Next we contacted a designer. Enough said. No one should skip this step if they want a serious web site rebuild.

The professional designer did a wonderful job, and hit the spot practically on the first try after we delivered our well-thought-out marketing plan and deliverables to her (it helps to be CLEAR with your designer and to know what your brand actually is…not what you guess it is! Even worse, lots of people ask their designer or developer to guess what their brand is – not a good result!)