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Each month Internet.Works arranges for a Commercial
Web site, in desperate
need of attention, to have a full makeover by a professional Web design company.
These makeovers treat more than just the surface layout and appearance. Often a site can
be let down by poor navigation or fails to provide
Meta information in the tags (which search engines read).
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Before online: www.jf-upholstery.co.uk
Before on the CD is not available this month.
After: www.art-on-the-web.com/chesterfields
After on the CD
House of Chesterfields
House of Chesterfields is no 'fly-by-night' Internet venture. In fact it's a
family-run business that has been successfully operating for over 30 years, but
that is no excuse for standing still, and about a year ago, Paul Fleming,
managing director of House of Chesterfields, decided to go on the Net. This
decision brought about new challenges and new rewards, opening up the market and
bringing customers from as far afield as the States. The site,
www.jf-upholstery.co.uk, is pretty good and has obviously brought in customers,
but Fleming felt that it could be improved, so he wrote to us asking for a
makeover. We, in turn, got in touch with Art on the Web, a Web design consultancy
based in London and asked its managing director, Gary Bortz, to see what he could
do.
Gary Bortz on the existing site:
The goal of the existing site is to sell English-crafted traditional and
upholstered leather furniture via the Internet. My understanding is that the
site has had some success in garnering orders from many countries.
The site was functional and comprehensive, with a complete array of detail images
for each item being offered for sale, including a set of QuickTime movies
allowing 360-degree rotation of each item. There were two very strong points of
the existing site that were worth trying to partially or wholly preserve: 1) the
relative ease of navigation through the various catalogue pages and 2) the
compact presentation, whereby minimal scrolling was necessary to view page
content.
The site also generally made use of good page titles, meta-tags and links to give
the pages some search engine relevancy. There are lots of little things that
could be done to create even better keyword relevancy, but this was not a primary
focus of our site makeover. Suffice it to say that meta-tags could have been
varied a bit more from page to page to try to target more search phrases, most
images could have been given alt tags, more text with embedded keywords
consciously used on the pages, and more keywords could have been hyper-linked.
We left addressing this goal primarily to a later phase of the site
redevelopment. For the most important key phrases, we would want to build
doorway pages optimised for each of the major search engines using a tool like
WebPosition Gold.
The most significant deficiencies of the existing site were in the colours and
graphics used for general page design. There were also some we could make to the
ordering and payment process. There were too many steps involved and some
confusion in the instructions.
The background colour was black, a useful choice for bringing out the colour and
drama when precious objects like ancient oriental sculptures are being displayed,
but not particularly effective for creating a bright and cheerful commercial
selling environment.
The "army" green used as a highlight colour against the black background and in
some of the graphics did not look particularly pleasing to the eye.
The general site graphics also needed improvement. The logo looked more or less
like it came from a FrontPage 98 template and needed redesigned. The text
navigation, which formed the primary means of navigating the site, would benefit
from some interactivity (i.e. rollover effects) to create more viewer interest
and clarity of use. The navigation buttons, highlighting aspects of the site such
as special offers, the free sample pack, credit terms, the QuickTime 360-degree
views, leather colours, frame colours, etc. could also benefit from a fresh look.
The buttons on the left side of the home page, also used on the "links", "about
us" and "policies" pages, for example, were too large, a little basic, and
contributed to these pages looking quite cluttered.
About Art on the Web
Gary Bortz, after a successful career in investment banking, founded Art on the
Web in late 1997 to help small-to-medium sized companies grow their businesses
via the Internet. We strive to understand our clients' businesses, enabling us
to add value to the overall company strategies in addition to delivering well
designed and easy-to-use web sites. We offer a range of new media services,
including graphic and web site design as well as multimedia presentations. We
have delivered in excess of 75 successful web sites to our business customers;
from the simplest "brochure-based" designs to full flash animation-based sites to
sophisticated e-commerce packages and database-query-driven content.
Gary works with Andrew Stagg. Andrew has been involved in computer programming
and design since 1989. Originally working in 2D and 3D graphic design, with the
growth of the Internet, Andrew has turned his attention to back end e-commerce
and database systems.
Our web sites are crafted with both the end-users and the search engines in mind.
A fine balance needs to be struck between stunning designs and content that adds
keyword relevancy to web pages. A site may look great but without the right
content and a strategy to attract users, such a site would be doomed to failure.
Art on the Web develops media strategies to help clients attract new customers
and maintain existing web site traffic.
The bottom line: Fully implemented, the site makeover would take two people, a
designer and a programmer about 11/2 weeks to complete at a cost to the client of
£5500.
www.art-on-the-web.com
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