You can find out more and see their new website at: The Handbook.

You can find out more and see their new website at: climatecars.com

Days Out is a separate branch of on line activity for the Silver Cross brand, intended to be a more user focused site that actively encourages on user interaction. Visitors can leave their own reviews and comments on places they’ve been with their children and rate them out of five stars. The site has been designed so that it is easy to use, and reviews and attraction can be uploaded with minimum fuss.

Designer Andrew Rees says: “When designing the Silver Cross Days Out website we really focused on ease of use and how to make the most of the great content. The layout is bright, spacious and fun reflecting the subject matter whilst always being clear and informative. Parents can quickly search for and discover great locations relevant to to their location and preferred activity type. The site has a real focus on the social aspects of the Days Out concept, integrating them throughout the site allowing parent recommendations and we look forward to seeing the community and site naturally grow.”

Job Title: Finance/Admin Executive
Employer: Graphic Alliance
Salary: £20-£30k (depending on experience)
Contract type: Permanent
Country: United Kingdom
Location Details: London WC2
Start Date: May 2011
Application Deadline: 23rd April 2011

Job Description
Graphic Alliance – specialists in eCommerce for luxury and fashion brands – seeks a bright individual with a passion for the internet to help us manage our daily finances and basically take charge of the administration of the office. Our ambitious candidate will be required to handle the company accounts and oversee the running of the office, working closely with the Finance Director.

You will be required to support the Managing Director and manage the Office Assistant. You must be confident and work well under pressure. Like all Graphic Alliance people, you will be expected to bring bags of energy, enthusiasm, initiative and excellent communication skills.

Essential requirements
• Accounts experience required and knowledge of Sage highly desirable
– Production of sales invoices and credit control
– Management of suppliers and purchase ledger
– Management of the bank accounts
– Maintenance of nominal ledger and monthly journals
– Production of monthly management accounts on excel
• Administration of WIP/Job Costing system, including close liaison with directors and staff to ensure timeliness and accuracy of information
• Office management experience
• Proficient in Microsoft Office products (Word, Excel, PowerPoint etc)
• Excellent communication skills – Fluent English, written and spoken
• A natural multitask attitude and ability to take initiative
• Professional approach and able to cope with pressure
• Articulate communication and initiative towards new projects
• Interest in design, content, technology, marketing and branding

Please email CVs to Alison Young – alison@graphicalliance.co.uk

PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO THE AMOUNT OF APPLICATIONS RECEIVED IT IS NOT ALWAYS POSSIBLE TO REPLY.

The average person in the UK spends £81 a month on online retail, according to recent figures, and retailers keen to get a share of this lucrative market have been launching new and updated sites focusing on commerce in the third quarter of this year.

Results from the IMRG/Capgemini e-Retail Sales Index show that British shoppers spent £5bn online in July, which represents a year-on-year rise of 18 per cent – and is a possible sign that the recession is lifting. Retailers are now attempting to tap into this potential market with sites that aim to bring the offline experience online and use social media to drive traffic.

Linford Haggie, managing director of consultancy Graphic Alliance, which specialises in online retail, says, ’The economic circumstances are certainly affecting people’s ability to spend online.’ He adds, ’What is happening a lot now is that the commerce site is becoming the final stop in the online journey. Social media is drawing people in and engaging them with the brand’s compelling content before they go to the commerce site at the end. Because of social media networks like Facebook and Twitter, content can be pushed at the consumer, as well as having them search for it.’

Graphic Alliance worked on the relaunch of the Conran Shop website, which went live earlier this month. The consultancy collaborated with the Conran Shop’s in-house team on the design of the site, while E-Inbusiness worked on the site build, based on an Episerver platform. Liam Butler, head of marketing at the Conran Shop, says the £250 000 project aims to drive online sales from their current level of just under £2m a year to £10m a year in 2014-15.

Butler says one aspect of the new site’s development will be to use social media to engage shoppers. The Conran Shop has appointed consultancy We Are Social to work on this aspect.

The site features a Sketchbook tool, which allows users to create ’personal mood boards’ by placing items in their wish lists on to a variety of backgrounds to create virtual rooms. These can then be shared with others through e-mail and Facebook. Butler says the aim is to exploit social networks further, ’so that Twitter can act as online concierge for us’.

The Conran Shop site itself ’aims to bring the offline experience online’ and ’ensure that the product is the hero’, according to Haggie. Butler says, ’A lot of companies go down the route of very expensive lifestyle photography – this can suck up the budget.’

He says the Conran Shop site is currently in phase one and is set to launch in France, the US and Japan in the next three months. Phase two of the site will roll out over the next six months, he says, allowing time to stabilise the platform and roll out more functionality. Butler adds, ’We see phase two rolling out with video or 360-degree coverage of products, so we can tell some of the background story.’

Like the Conran Shop, Japanese clothes retailer Uniqlo, which relaunched its website last Thursday, also aims to harness social media, in this case to alert shoppers to its new site. Dentsu Japan, which designed the site, also developed two social media initiatives in the run-up to the launch, called Lucky Machine and Lucky Counter.

Lucky Machine was an online pinball game in which players were given the opportunity to win a £1000 cash prize as well as online discount vouchers. Crucially, to get balls for the game, players had to invite friends to play using Facebook or Twitter.

The Lucky Counter initiative, which ran in the week leading up to the site launch, encouraged users to tweet about selected Uniqlo items to reduce costs – the more tweets there were, the lower the cost became. The site itself, like the Conran Shop site, offers more product images, with increased zoom levels on the products.

Uniqlo’s high street rivals Gap and Zara have both launched transactional websites in the past weeks, both designed in-house, while H&M is set to launch an in-house-designed site on 16 September. All three sites are global roll-outs and are posited by the brands as part of their ongoing expansion plans. Pablo Isla, deputy chairman and chief executive of Zara owner Inditex, says, ’The Internet and the world of social networking are indispensable tools and extraordinary channels for communication and fit perfectly with our group’s philosophy.’

Online shopping

51% of British adults shop online

76% of people in the UK have Internet access

UK shoppers spent £5bn online in July 2010

Source: IMRG/Capgemini

Graphic Alliance fashions website for Vivienne Westwood with ‘blank canvas’ pages.

Graphic Alliance has created a new website for fashion designer Vivienne Westwood.

The site, which launches this week, acts as an online base for the Vivienne Westwood brand, as well as having e-commerce functionality. The consultancy developed creative concepts for the site in collaboration with the team behind fashion magazine Tank.

The site has been designed as a blank canvas, on which dynamic elements can be placed as the client or designer wishes. This has been created using a content management system developed by GA. Consultancy managing director Linford Haggie says, ‘There’s no order to it – no grid. It’s as close as a website has got to the style of editorial design while still having an e-commerce function. ‘

Visitors to the site can move elements around on the homepage, including links to the brand story, the collections and the online store. If a user redesigns the site, then navigates away from it, it will remember their bespoke designs for the next time they visit the site.

A navigation bar also provides links, and a button on the site allows the users to flip between ‘random’ and ‘grid’ settings.

The blank canvas concept is used throughout the site, apart from point-of-purchase, where clarity is required and a grid system is used.

The site uses fashion photography and archive material, to reflect Westwood’s history.

Haggie says, ‘We wanted the site to reflect the brand, which is unconventional, quirky, eccentric and chaotic.’

He says GA was appointed about nine months ago and has been working on the site for some six months. He says GA and Tank previously worked together on the designs for fashion site Because.

Westwood was last week awarded a special commendation in the 2010 Prince Philip Designers Prize. It was also announced that she will be customising next year’s Brit Awards trophy, as part of a branding exercise led by Manchester consultancy Music.

Visit the new Vivienne Westwood site and tell us what you think. Click here.

Luxury retailer The Conran Shop had a website redesign last week, and I’ve been checking out the new look version.

The site contains a number of expensive designer products, but is it doing enough to showcase these big ticket items?

Homepage

The homepage has a clean, uncluttered look with good presentation of the featured products. I like the fact that users can click to get the price and details of the products shown, and head straight to the product page if they want to:

This seems obvious, but it is something many sites don’t do. Having used lots of valuable homepage space to promote products, it makes sense to lead customers straight to product pages if they are interested.

Navigation

The drop downs on the homepage can be fiddly, since the links are small and close together, while white text on a black background can be a strain on your eyes.

If you click a sub-category from the drop-down menus, it often doesn’t bring up further sub-categories (or should it be sub-sub-categories?) on the next page, just a repetition of the labels from the drop down.

The products from the selected sub-category, in this case tea and coffee are shown, but unlike many e-commerce sites, there are no further filtered navigation options on the left hand side.

This particular category (tea & coffee) brings up 65 products, a mixture of espresso makers, kettles, teapots, mugs and more, but the refinement options, unless you are looking for products from a particular designer or collection, do little to help narrow the search:

The site search works well, returning accurate results and dealing with misspellings. It can actually be a more effective method of narrowing product selection than by browsing the site.

In general, the links are small on the site, and could be made to stand out more. For example, every product on the site search results page above has a blue ‘buy now’ link, but these links could be clearer. This also means that viewing and clicking the links on an iPad is difficult to do without plenty of pinching and zooming.

Product pages

Product pages look good, but they are short on detail; delivery charges aren’t that easy to find, while there are a few irritations.

For example, there is a colour palette on the product page for this chair, which is a good feature let down by the fact that there is only one image available, so clicking on any colour but crimson will produce a ‘no photo available’ message.

While there is a broad range of prices on the site, there are many big ticket items, but the product images and options don’t do as much as they could to showcase designer furniture.

The product images are high quality, and can also be seen in full screen view, but that’s it. When viewing a chair for £5,000, it would be good to see it from different angles. The product pages would benefit from tools such as the 360 view used by Schuh, or the kind of 3D planning tools used by MyDeco.

There are links to add the product to a MyDeco wishlist, but this requires registration for new users, and it can be lengthy process to get from the Conran product page to the room planner on MyDeco.

I found that a number of products were out of stock when I arrived at the product page. While it can be annoying to find that products are unavailable, at least the site gives shoppers the options of an email notification when the product becomes available.

This is a good idea, but the site could also appeal to shoppers who don’t want to wait for an email by suggesting alternatives to the selected item, or else checking offline stock and pointing shoppers to the nearest store.

The pop-ups are slightly annoying too. Shoppers have to first click the basket link to leave an email address before typing it into the box, while they have to click the small cross to close the pop-up, instead of simply clicking elsewhere on the page.

Checkout process

Once products are added to the basket, the basket link at the top right of the page is too small, and it isn’t possible to mouse over to get a summary of contents and charges. Shopping basket links should be easier for users to find.

The site handles the issue of registration smoothly, providing a login option for existing users, while new customers can simply enter an email address and continue on to the checkout.

Later in the process, customers are offered the option of creating an account, which is a good way of capturing customer details. However, the site asks customers to open a pop-up window to see the benefits of registration, but this information would have been better explained in a couple of bullet points next to the tick box.

A contact number is visible throughout the checkout process, which is good practice, as it offers reassurance to customers and a clear channel for getting an answer to any questions about their order.

The process has not been enclosed and the top navigation options are still in place throughout the payment process.

This is now an unusual sight for website redesigns, as the top navigation bar offers a distraction for customers when retailers would like them to focus on entering address and payment details, and there are a number of links which will take them out of the process altogether.

Conclusion

The new Conran Shop website generally does the basics reasonably well; navigation and site search is functional, most information that customers will need is accessible, and the checkout process is smooth enough.

As Matt Curry pointed out in a previous post though, many websites have yet to deliver a luxury e-commerce experience. The Conran Shop website doesn’t really differentiate itself from most other e-commerce sites, and doesn’t do as much as it could to sell big ticket items.

Matt points out that luxury brands need to do more than simply deliver a standard e-commerce experience, and should seek to delight customers and to carry some of the in store experience online.

Take a look at Temperley London’s facebook page , click on the ‘Store’ tab and you’ll see a page that acts as a shop front to the Temperley online shop – directly from Facebook.

Of course, Temperley aren’t the first brand to embrace this idea (brands have been using FBML (Facebook Markup Language) in Facebook to modify pages for a while now). However, what’s so clever about the Temperley Store page is that website and social media administrators at Temperley do not need any knowledge of HTML or FBML in order to modify the page.

In fact, this page is created and controlled entirely through their CMS. So, if they wanted to change their hero product, layout of the page or link through to a specific product instead of to category pages, they could do this quickly and easily in house.

Although it seems as though Facebook will be launching a payment platform very soon, this is currently not available and (for many reasons) may not be right for them in the future anyway. So, for Temperley London, this method of directing Facebook users straight to purchase on the website is  a perfect way of monetizing their page quickly and efficiently.

Job Description:

Graphic Alliance – specialists in eCommerce for luxury goods and fashion brands – seeks a bright allrounder with a passion for the internet to help us extend and optimise our clients’ social media strategies. This combined role involves a mix of editorial, social media, SEO and PR, and is primarily intended to help our client’s marketing teams to improve the merchandising of its products in the digital space. This is a great opportunity to work with A-list clients like The Conran Shop, Vivienne Westwood, Silver Cross and Temperley London. Perks include a competitive salary, offices in Covent Garden, health insurance, monthly nights out, the legendary summer party, cookies of the edible variety, beers on a Thursday……

Day-to-day tasks:

• Blogger and journalist communication
• Influencer engagement
• Social media management
• Reputation monitoring and management
• On and offsite community engagement
• Editorial / production tasks
• Press release writing and distribution
• Website content and copywriting
• Strategic SEO initiatives
• Measurement and analysis of results

Candidate requirements:

• Excellent writing skills
• Attention to detail
• Passion for the internet
• Understanding and experience of SEO, PR and social media networks
• Excellent communication skills
• Ability to work autonomously
• Commercially astute
• Able to work in Central London
• Sense of humour
• Experience in online PR, SEO or social media role
• Digital marketing expertise
• Solid grasp of Google Analytics
• Onsite optimisation experience / knowledge
• Production skills (Photoshop, Word, Excel, multimedia etc)
• Experience of blogging
• Copy editing / proof reading skills
• Entrepreneurial flair
• Statistical analysis skills

Brownie points:

• Relevant degree or higher
• Retail / merchandising experience
• More than three years experience in the internet industry
• Graphic Alliance facebook fan / twitter follower

Please email CVs to Alison Young – alison@graphicalliance.co.uk
PLEASE NOTE THAT DUE TO THE AMOUNT OF APPLICATION RECEIVED IT IS NOT ALWAYS POSSIBLE
TO REPLY.

Back in 2003, WordPress started as a blogging system, but has now evolved into a content management system (a.k.a. CMS) where almost anything can be made possible thanks to a wealth of different plugins, widgets and themes. In fact, just one look at some of our previous work will demonstrate to you how much WordPress can be manipulated and how versatile it can be.

Take, for instance, Because Magazine – the digital fashion magazine from the people behind Tank. It’s a high end, click to buy fashion magazine that simply oozes cool in a suitably unobtrusive manner. Since its launch back in September 2009, Because Magazine has been hailed in the press and most memorably described as “high-end fashion pornography… that makes me want to rob a bank while simultaneously winning the lottery” (NMA site of the week, 8^th October 2009). We also got the chance to tell .net magazine all about the bespoke functions such as the wishlist, login and personal profiles which were made possible through extensively modified plugins to match the design and requirements of the website.

Or, for something a little different, why not take a look WOW Toys, who wanted a fully immersive brand experience built using an open source CMS. This site also received some brilliant coverage and featured on makebetterwebsites.com, bestcssgallery.com, welovewp.com and designshack.co.uk – to name but a few!

Nevertheless, flexible it may be, WordPress is not a full featured CMS (like the Graphic Alliance CMS). As a simple CMS it works brilliantly – search engines love it, it’s easy to use, and it looks great. However, if you’re after a database of information or a site which can hold all sorts of different content, then you will need to look further than WordPress which is, after all, just a blogging platform.

Even so, we can’t fault WordPress and love the power, flexibility and amazing community behind it!