13
Mar 2009
Posted in Blog, Design, News, Recent Projects by John
Our friends over at GoKart have just launched a newly updated Kart for the 2009 golf season and with it we’ve provided a shiny new collection of adverts. This years look is a bit darker and aggresive than previous campaigns and fits in well with the new stealthy black frame now available. In addition to the ads produced below we’ve also been madly updating the websites and brushing up on our linguistic skills to help launch the product across Europe. Expect more sites soon!
10
Dec 2008
Posted in Blog, Design, News, Recent Projects by John
When we updated the site recently the transition from old site to new meant that a few projects which should have been blogged about when they first launched got missed. As a bit of a catchup and to get things back on track I thought I’d do a quick rundown of what we were up to work-wise whilst getting the new site online.
Chouchoute
Chouchoute chocolaterie is a luxury chocolate shop unlike any other on the high street. There’s no point describing the chocolates here, but we recommend you pop in and chat to Pierre if you want to know why they’re different (and have a taste obviously). As well as selling from their boutique shop in Birmingham, Chouchoute also sell online which is where 383 come in to the story. Historically selling online had been a mixed bag and Chouchoute needed a shop that provided more flexibility to manage on a day to day basis and offered a more design led experience for customers. We developed a full ecommerce solution for Chouchoute using the open source platform Magento. Using Magento allowed us to adopt a platform that was already feature rich and had a strong developer community behind it, leaving more time to customise the more complicated elements in house and focus on a theme that suited the Chouchoute brand. A lot of what we ended up building bespoke for the shop has now been integrated in to the standard Magento framework and we’d highly recommend people to check it out (or chat to us!) if they’re looking for an open source ecommerce solution. You can view more images in our portfolio and check out the site here.
eg UK
383 started working with eg earlier this year and as part of their improved offer to customers helped them revamp their website. eg are a major player in developing software which helps big businesses monitor and implement all manner of work processes and operational performance strategies (you can tell we’ve been working together closely when I can rattle that out of my brain!). The site has a secure customer only area to enable eg to promote product enhancements and field technical enquiries, as well as some cool live share data charts pulled from the LSE. You can visit the site here or read a bit more in the folio listing here.
Direct Marketing Commission
The DMC is the UK body which oversees and regulates direct marketing on behalf of recipients and practitioners. 383 were asked to create a site which would inform users of their role in direct marketing, and provide an improved means of communication between the DMC and the public. As well as giving the organisation the means to publish regular news, we also built an online complaints form which will hopefully improve the ways in which the DMC can communicate with the public and increase the overall responsiveness of the organisation.
Ways HR Consulting
Ways HR are an HR consultancy providing training and guidance for public and private sector organisations. The project at this phase has revolved around building a basic presence for Ways, ensuring that potential clients know what they do and how they could help. Part of the sites development has involved building an organisational health check which scores users answers and allows Ways to feedback on potential improvements to the users businesses processes. Phase two of the project involves building a site dedicated to elearning and online training which we’re really excited about – more on that later!
GoKart Brochure
Lastly, I blogged a while back about the GoKart brochure photoshoot. Well, now it’s all complete, printed and tucked away here in our portfolio.
3
Mar 2008
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…
