Project Launch: The Outdoor Gear
The Outdoor Gear is an online store offering discount hiking apparel and outdoor gear. Our goal with this project was to increase the bottom line (sales). Successful stores employ a combination of techniques, strategies, platforms and good ol’ fashioned business practice to reach their goals. We started by addressing the objectives of the site, creating a design theme, then we analyzed the flaws, creating solutions for each “kink” in the current site.
At the end of the day we have a site that addresses the marketing 4 p’s. Through design and architect, we are enforcing the value, specificity, brand and service. See pre-redesign image below.
A unique challenge to this project, was the owner of the site demanded Yahoo! store functionality. Yahoo! store is powered by RTML, a proprietary mark up language to HTML, this makes it possible for their template system to be manipulated by novice users, yet difficult for web developers. Solution; we built the site in static HTML (long time since we’ve done anything static) and used Yahoo! store tags so that the product variables are all customizable by the store owner using the Yahoo! store back-end.
The Outdoor Gear provides high quality, affordable outdoor gear and apparel (similar to Patagonia and REI) at discount prices.
Before re-design:
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Would be interested to learn how you solved the problem of adding new/removing old pages to the Yahoo store. Apparently, it is a challenge when using store tags..
May 24th, 2010 at 7:26 am -
Yes this was a concern, Yahoo had no way of creating 301 redirects. What we did was create duplicate pages with oldpage.html with so our new pages could get indexed and old pages removed from search engine index.
This however, is not ideal, as other sites might be linking to the old page, and there would be duplicate content on the site. What needs to happen is for Yahoo to allow htaccess in the hosting environment OR create a tool in the control panel to redirect product pages.
June 16th, 2010 at 7:44 am
