E-Commerce Website Redesign for Creative Solutions

*WARNING!* There is some geeky tech website jargon in this case study... If you want to skip that and see the website design in its full glory, why not head over to the Creative Solutions site and take a look?

About Creative Solutions

Creative Solutions are one of the UK's most popular print and display providers. With a national presence in various sectors of printing, signage and exhibition, their website is their primary marketing tool. Having worked with us for over 10 years, we are constantly tweaking and adapting their e-commerce store to keep it in line with modern web standards. At the end of 2017, Creative Solutions undertook a significant rebrand that we tied in with a range of new updates and features for the website.

Creative Solutions already make full use of our e-commerce features, with some pretty cool areas (only cool if you're geeks like us) like a customer relationship management module, advanced product customisation, an order and dispatch system, remarketing and full social media integration. The key focus of this particular redesign was the appearance and look and feel of the website.

Improving the Product Hierarchy 

With over 700 products and a diverse range of categories, the first port of call was to take a step back and re-evaluate the site hierarchy. Helping users reach the product or category they're looking for quickly is integral to the success of any e-commerce store. If a user can't find what they're looking for, rather than scour around the site to find it, our research shows they're far more likely to leave and go somewhere else to get what they want. We introduced a bespoke product filter that allows the client to populate each category with targeted, unique filters as well as a pricing filter automatically populated depending on the price range in each category. It was important that this worked perfectly across all devices, so as with all of our content we made sure it resized and conformed nicely on any screen size.

From a search engine optimisation perspective, rearranging the site hierarchy required careful consideration. We conducted extensive prior research to decipher which pages were generating high traffic and revenue before deciding what pages should be moved. Pairing an improved user experience with a clear and logical site hierarchy meant that everything we did was designed to further improve their organic rankings in Google. 

Design

On to the exciting bit, the design. We worked closely with the Creative team to find out exactly what their brief was and how they wanted the site to look - no-one knows their customers better than the client! We then match this up with some detailed analysis on how users are actually using the website, and pair these two ideas together to form a clear brief. Throw in our 20+ years of industry experience in web design and user experience, and between us all it's a pretty comprehensive website plan that has all bases covered. Creative Solutions provided us with a new set of brand guidelines to work with, helping us to ensure it was consistent throughout.

We sought to create an uncluttered and smooth website with plenty of whitespace. With a large amount of content per page, scrolling down the page and revealing more content needed to be an eye-catching and seamless experience for the user. The use of full-width imagery, banded colour backgrounds and videos throughout the site broke the pages up whilst drawing attention to key call to actions. What Creative Solutions print and produce for their customers is a highly visual process that needed to be clearly represented throughout.

We loved working with Creative Solutions on their rebranding and website design and look forward to working closely with them throughout 2018. If you would like to see the site in closer detail, why not head on over and take a look?

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