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 and creating a design theme. By analyzing the flaws of the site we found solutions and methods to improve performance.
At the end of the day we have a site that addresses the marketing 4 p’s. Through design and architecture we are reinforcing the value, specificity of the product and highlighting the brand. 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:
2 Responses to “Project Launch: The Outdoor Gear”
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..
Yes this was a concern, Yahoo has no way of creating 301 redirects. What we did was create duplicate pages using ie: oldpage.html containing a “robots noindex” and meta refresh to new product page, so 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.