Fresh New Look for Arena Flowers – Redesigning Our Website And Shopfront
Those of you with a keen eye will have already spotted what the title of this post is alluding to. In fact we published the new template for the website several weeks ago but it was only this week that we finished the revamp by publishing a new blog theme in line with the look of the rest of the site.
The idea of redesigning the site had been high on the to-do list since we went live back on the 19th September 2006. So it seems strange to finally get around to it almost two years to the day, but we have a good excuse. In the past two years we have concentrated on making our site work better and better; having a new lick of paint is something of a luxury when you compare it to some of the other things we have been up to: Ethical Products, Photo Upload, a Facebook application, Video Upload, Gift Ideas, our Fun Page, Arena Bloemen (NL), Arena Blumen (DE) to name but a few…
However, a slight lull in my schedule allowed me to focus on a new design and I sat down to sketch out a few ideas. Designing a new template has to be one of my favourite things as it really exercises both sides of the brain, left for design and right for practicalities and, in our case, business. A successful website has to be both aesthetically pleasing and practical to use. To this end a good example of a redesign is where the user does not realise that the site has had a facelift and just navigates the site as if they are familiar with it.
As I said, we finally got around to redesigning the site once we had two years of trading under our belt, which in many ways makes it much harder to do. The worst nightmare for any successful e-commerce website is when the design team go in and mess up the sales by releasing a badly planned design. If you often buy online you may have noticed that both Amazon and Play.com have had a recent redesign. In my opinion Amazon have done a good job, but it did take months of testing to achieve this goal. The trick for any big site design is for it to easily display your wares while not confusing the user. Like Amazon, our range of products had increased and we needed improved navigation while maintaining a pleasurable user experience.
So that was the brief and to get the job done a variety of designs had to be created. We went through six different looks and various iterations in between before we settled on the final look. This is where you all laugh and say “hang on – it looks the same!”
Yes, it’s true the new look is not a million miles away from the previous design – and that is not because I am a belligerent designer who gets in a huff unless I get my own way. Nor is it the opposite, where some radical design was picked apart in committee, ending up a shadow of its former self. The truth is we polished something that we knew to work. I hate to say it, but if it ain’t broke…
In practical terms the new design does a few key things. The shorter header brings the products further up the fold of the page, the Flash bar beneath allows for an expandable area for promotion/brand (with a funky new backend feature that easily allows me to amend it for our multilingual sites). We have a new means to manage content down the right hand side of the site, with a cleaner look to boot. And finally the colours within the framework have been refreshed to appear cleaner. In terms of navigation the back end has been updated to allow for simple insertion of new top level tabs/categories as well as a new list of associated categories that is housed within the green bar across the top of each particular category. In fact a lot of the new design is behind the scenes, backend tools that allow us to further tweak the live site as we wish.
It would be wrong for me to write this post without mentioning the adage ‘Web 2.0′ but in doing so I have invited the question “why does it not look more Web 2.0?” The answer to that is simple, we are first and foremost a shop and not a blog or website promoting a new app for the iPhone. We have a simple job to do and that is to list a lot of products as simply and easily as possible. We can’t afford to go off on a tangent of tag clouds and ajax elbow doilies just because I have a fetish for plug-ins. I would love to pile in loads of widgets and call it my experimental phase, but the truth is I would lose my job because all our traffic will have bogged off to Wikipedia to look up the meaning of the various words on our site.
So we have a simple – working – website: one that does the job of selling flowers and does so without being intrusive in the process. I love the way our site looks but the truth is we could have a gold-plated website but that would be irrelevant if we had bad customer service or our flowers were not up to standard. Our redesign is simply the icing on what I am proud to say is a very good cake.
Please feel free to share feedback on the design in the comments section about things you like or don’t like about the new design. It’s always great to get as many views as possible.
Similar posts: If you enjoyed this post, you may also enjoy this one about the launch of Arena Bloemen, this one about our development of “Arena For Business” (our business tailored ofering) or this post where the design was in the real world, wrapping our delivery vans in Arena Flowers branding.
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Filed under: General, Marketing, Matters Webby on September 14th, 2008
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I really like the new look. A lot more consistent across blog, homepage and other parts of the site.
It’s funny looking back on the waybackwhen machine to see a pre launch version of the site from mid 2006! Times have changed!
http://web.archive.org/web/20060806115841/http://www.arenaflowers.com/
Woah, thats not fair! That’s pre launch and importantly when I was still pushing ideas around the table. I hate waybackwhen :)
Sam, you’re right, I looked at that page and couldn’t see any changes. ;)
Good to see you carefully considered things when making changes and how you went about the process.
Do you guys use any A/B testing framework?
Personally I would love to see the results of a much cleaner (simpler / less text heavy page). There is a lot to deal with cognitively, and take in. Now that might work with flowers, although I’d love see the conversion ratio for pages of different cognitive load. I know the text stuff is great for SEO, so business wise their is balancing act between incoming traffic and conversion. Lower traffic from SEO but higher conversion could be better business. Especially when you are paying for that traffic on adwords.
I’d also love to see the main content area replaced by a “flower of the day” highlighting a great choice and option / special, with a real high def quality image. Perhaps even a 3d bunch of flowers
Hey Adrian
We do use A/B testing in a few different ways. We have just concluded several months worth of product testing where users were severed different product images, names and descriptions. As you might expect this was to test conversion. We are also currently running a similar test with McAfee (Top right hand corner of the site). This is a straight forward A/B test, 50/50 split of users get served the McAfee stamp based on a cookie and we see how the conversion performs. All very simple stuff, however we didn’t try anything similar with the new site design. The main reason being that there wasn’t enough structural change to monitor, a lot of the new design is polish rather than features. It would have been nice to run the two templates in tandem for a while but we have a lot of pages and they are cached in various ways so that would have been a lot of dev to monitor a slightly self-indulgent test :)
Personally I am all up for running a more comprehensive test like you suggest but Will would take a lot of convincing to ‘test’ the traffic in that way. We see a huge swing in conversion from the simplest things, sometimes a well positioned button is all it takes to give the day a lift. So testing a simplified design – one with reduced content – could prove costly.
Next time.
BTW – I do like the 3D flowers idea….*opens Illustrator*
I’d be surprised if the McAfee stamp makes any difference. I hope it doesn’t since if it does my world view crumbles a little.
A simplified design could prove costly. Or it could prove revenue generating. Depends which side of the risk / reward curve you like. I would think though they you guys get enough traffic to do an effective test without compromising the overall business?