NEW SITE FOR GOKART GOES LIVE
Posted in Design, News, Recent Projects by John
We’ve just launched a new site for our friends at GoKart. The site features a few cool features including a nicely constructed shop for the new range of coloured carts and some short videos to give customers a better view of the product itself. It’s been a great process building the site and having to think strategically about how the web could be used to reflect the ethos of GoKart’s offline service, as well as returning a better customer conversion rate.
At the outset of the project we conducted a web audit for the client, something we like to do not to poke holes in whatever currently exists, but more to flag up areas in which the site could be performing better. This might be suggestions for better sales conversions through improved SEO, or more fluffy stuff, like ‘because we think it would look nice’. After this part of the process it became clear that the main challenges would be ‘how do we engage our customer base and strike a good tone of voice’ and ‘how do we translate the qualities of a well designed product in an environment where you can’t be hands-on’. So, we went about coming up with some designs which balanced sales and product info, with more chit-chatty blog content. I’m sometimes a little cynical about suggesting a blog as a business tool for our clients – I’m definately not of the school of thought that it is right for every business and think in most cases it should only be used if there’s actually something worth ‘blogging’ about. With a company like Gokart it made sense – they have a genuine knowledge of quirky golf related content (not just sales, sales, sales!) and an existing offline dialogue with their customer base that could be used to good effect to help build a fuller picture of the type of company you’d be dealing with.
We then went about spending a day filming a series of short videos to cover every aspect of the user experience with the trolley. The videos not only say a lot more than several pages of text could, but also help illustrate the users interaction with the product – something which doesn’t always come across that clearly in a static image. The video was added to the site inside an extended banner on the homepage – we wanted to keep loading time down and didn’t want a load of streaming content hitting users the minute they landed on the page – especially if they were returning customers who had no need to watch the videos over and over.
Finally, we bought the site together with some neat copywriting that had been successful in our other print advertisements that had been running for the last few months. The launch of the new site coincides with the launch of a new range of coloured GoKarts, expanding the company’s offer and providing a tool to cross promote the launch of the new site in the press. We developed the ‘flying colours’ ad shown below which will be appearing in magazines this month…
March 3rd, 2008 at 4:21 pm
Really tidy site guys, nice job!