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eCommerce With Style
Not many of us will ever get the opportunity to work on an ecommerce site the size of amazon.com. There are many other medium sized ecommerce sites of course that will probably employee many developers, but I (Patrick McNeil) believe it is the small sites that have some of the most potential for creative and beautiful presentations. The tiny specialty shops that work in a small niche.
Large sites tend to die in committees, where groups of people determine how things will work and look. In many ways this is great, I am sure Amazon excels in terms of usability and accessibility and it certainly has some advanced features. The site does have a distinct look, but it is really more of a standard design. Sites such as this have set our expectations to low I believe.
Small ecommerce sites present an awesome opportunity; the product and market are much more focused and can be much more accurately addressed. Consider Amazon again, their customer base includes just about anyone using a computer. They sell books, music, computers and even groceries. That is a pretty broad market! On the other hand take a look at the custom cloths found on Struck Apparel. They have a small niche product that a much smaller demographic will be shopping for.
This opportunity to create a more focused marketing plan is very empowering, it is so much easier, and I think more fun to design within constraints such as this. Other wise you are left floundering trying to find a direction. So if your market is teenage girls or seniors in retirement embrace your market and capitalize on what appeals to them.
With tools such as Yahoo! Stores and eBay it is all to easy to fall into the default template. For some this might be ok, but if you are reading this I am sure you expect more. These samples all rise above the rest and stand as superb inspiration for what can be accomplished on an ecommerce site.
The building of an eCommerce store is no small chore, even if your working from an existing application. Home grown, or off the shelf, eCommerce systems are huge complex beasts. At their heart they are applications, and very different from your run of the mill static site. Applying a skin to such a beast is typically about the biggest pain in the butt one could imagine. This difficulty makes it all that much more impressive when you find beautiful examples.
One example I particularly like is etnies.com. I like this one because on the surface it doesn't look so much like an ecommerce site. Instead of a home page full of specials and clutter you have a nice and straightforward portal to their products, and hidden below you have an eCommerce system ready to take orders. This is the type of site that likely has a following, and I suspect a large repeat customer base. As such, they have focused on making the site attractive and easy to browse with out an over the top sales pitch trying to get you to stash stuff in a shopping cart. Sure, they could probably sell more product if they did so, but instead they choose to reflect part of their personality in the more passive approach.
In contrast to this approach we can take a look at what might be considered a more typical approach to eCommerce site structure; take a look at Blooming Direct for example. The home page for this site is really heavy, a feature which can be very dangerous. But of course this site has risen above that. The home page is easy to scan and provides a great portal to the content below. A combination of stand out section headings (What's hot, seasons, etc) and clear photography makes the home page a breeze to scan and drill down into it. What really gets me excited about this site though is the polish of the design. The site has been very effectively branded in such a way as to fit the topic of the site. It is no small feat to make sure each and every element has been addressed. Most sites like this tend to turn out frankenstein style where some element was rushed and not effectively mashed into the theme of the site. It takes great persistence to create a site such as this.
The fashion industry brings a very unique set of talents to the world of web design. For many of these companies the inevitable desire to use their fashion skills in this alternate medium is a logical path. As a result their sites are a direct reflection of their skills in the visual arts. It is no surprise that this industry puts so much energy into the web. After all it is a representation of them and they wouldn't dare be caught out of style.
As a whole, these sites have a rather distinct style to them. Almost every one of them has a slightly atypical layout and navigation. They have by no means followed the heard and simply replicated the standard formats. And of course this is a direct reflection of the way the fashion industry works. Fashion design is all about forward thinking and figuring out the next style, and even creating the next style. So it is no surprise to find these sites as unique as they are.
Another common thread among these sites is the strong use of photography. Which should come as no surprise of course. What’s interesting is that many of them use it as background elements. This works really well as it allows the images to be nice and large. Besides, they must have thousands of spectacular photos to pick from, why not use them heavily. After all photos more then anything will communicate the styles and designs of these artists. No need to point out a specific example for this one, pretty much all of them do this.
The overall sense of style in these sites is really amazing. This is most definitely an industry web designers can learn from. It’s really exciting to see how their extreme knowledge of fashion design can be translated in this digital medium. This is certainly a skill other types of artist struggle with.
Fashion
The fashion industry brings a very unique set of talents to the world of web design. For many of these companies the inevitable desire to use their fashion skills in this alternate medium is a logical path. As a result their sites are a direct reflection of their skills in the visual arts. It is no surprise that this industry puts so much energy into the web. After all it is a representation of them and they wouldn't dare be caught out of style.
As a whole, these sites have a rather distinct style to them. Almost every one of them has a slightly atypical layout and navigation. They have by no means followed the heard and simply replicated the standard formats. And of course this is a direct reflection of the way the fashion industry works. Fashion design is all about forward thinking and figuring out the next style, and even creating the next style. So it is no surprise to find these sites as unique as they are.
Another common thread among these sites is the strong use of photography. Which should come as no surprise of course. What’s interesting is that many of them use it as background elements. This works really well as it allows the images to be nice and large. Besides, they must have thousands of spectacular photos to pick from, why not use them heavily. After all photos more then anything will communicate the styles and designs of these artists. No need to point out a specific example for this one, pretty much all of them do this.
The overall sense of style in these sites is really amazing. This is most definitely an industry web designers can learn from. It’s really exciting to see how their extreme knowledge of fashion design can be translated in this digital medium. This is certainly a skill other types of artist struggle with.
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