Fresh

Recently, I walked around the office with my Flip camera and asked the eROI team about ecommerce sites. We talked about the ones that we liked, what could be improved, and what people should think about when creating an online shopping experience. Since we work in the digital marketing industry, it should come as no surprise that we’re highly critical of things like overall brand experience, way-finding, and ease of use.

Two things that are critical to address at the onset of any project are the measurable business objectives and analytic goals. In our design process at eROI, these things are kept at the forefront of every project; these two things guide our designers as they begin creating their web designs. By always referring back to the objectives and goals, and making creative decisions that strive to directly impact these things, we’re setting our clients up to succeed on those two fronts.

Our process helps to ensure that these things don’t get overlooked or forgotten about as a project evolves. I’ve visited other ecommerce sites before, however, where the functional and transactional experience is incredibly poor, and I end up leaving the site feeling disgruntled, confused, and/or frustrated. I’m sure that all of us have experienced a site that left us wanting more or saying to ourselves, “This site could be better if they’d only [insert awesome suggestion here].”

What are some of your favorite ecommerce sites and why?

Can you guess what the most important piece of software is on a personal computer? It’s not Notepad, it’s not any office productivity suite, and it’s not Solitaire. Certainly the most important piece of software, at least since the 90’s, is the web browser. The web browser has brought the whole world together digitally through web email, shopping web sites, and Facebook. (And yes, you can also use a web browser as a notepad, office suite, and you can play Solitaire with one, too.)

Content on the web has evolved from simple text and tables to elaborate layouts of page intermixed with images, audio, and video. The underlying HTML used to display this rich content has evolved as well. From the early workings of HTML 1 all the way to HTML 4, HTML has seen a steady growth. The current version, HTML 4, is great. The language allows for embedded objects (like Flash), and other neat stuff.

HTML 1 (left) to HTML 4 (right)

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When our long-time client, Wacom, approached us with a new line of touch enabled tablets, they were looking for an integrated marketing campaign that would drive sales and exposure for their new product. Wacom was thinking about abandoning traditional print-based advertising in favor of doing only web-based advertising, which was a major change for them. We took this opportunity to dive in as a team and come up with something truly different. What we ended up creating was a truly integrated marketing campaign that took one central idea and expressed it in several different ways. The results were more than any of us could have expected.

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I just found out about this site today, and I really dig the idea! Humble Pied features interviews with creatives (check out the latest post which features Aaron Draplin) over iChat. The advice they share is geared towards recent graduates and folks still finding their way in the industry.

The presentation is super clean and the idea is simple : “One inspiring creative sharing one piece of advice, all over iChat.” Go check it out for yourself!

In this years’ election the Internet played a new, critical role in politics that gave us a glimpse at what’s to come and the future of the World Wide Web as a multi-functional tool that has already been used to accomplish everything from organizing grass-roots campaign efforts, raising campaign funds, creating discussion boards, inspiring countless blogs to becoming the constant face of a whole campaign.

The key word here is constant. Anyone at anytime could go to a candidates website and learn their views on the issues and how they plan to deal with them. They were taking advantage of higher bandwidths to show video and audio clips of rallies, speeches and even supporters’ home videos.

They were also taking full advantage of the e-commerce aspects of the web by not only offering sections to donate to the campaigns but also pages to buy t-shirts, buttons, coffee mugs and signs. The Obama-Biden site even has selected products for sale directly on the home page.

A major difference in their e-commerce sections was the user experience. Once in the McCain-Palin store each section takes you to a different looking third party e-com site that doesn’t even attempt to carry over any design or feel from the home site. This is in stark contrast to the Obama-Biden store experience that was fluid and consistent with no disconnect as the store carries every aspect of the design into their e-commerce interface.

Obama’s Store Page               Mccain’s Store Page

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Any site that can get our design team dancing and singing is an automatic win, I’d say.

Our Art Director Garrett found the Harajuku Lovers Fragrance Site via The FWA (an amazing resource, BTW) and brought it up at our last team lunch n’ learn. The Flash site promotes a line of fragrances by Gwen Stefani, and features some pretty engaging web design.

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