Another site to look at!

[pinbrook]

It took a while but I found the post by Brian- here are some snippets which I feel define the diiference between a layout and a design

Our expereince with merchants has shown that a Actinic theme may help a merchant start a site and get it live but you really need a professional design to give your visiters the comfort level to know your serious as an online merchant and a true professional organization. Location is number one in my book but right after location is "making a good first impression". You may have 10 seconds to impress your visitor.

give it a more professional feeling by incorporating some images in the header and softening the look by actually embedding a design into the themes.

but your gonna need a good site design to really make an impact in sales. Here is a site we built that sells greek stuff, http://greektownimports.com. This site use to use a generic template. After the redeployment their sales have more then tripled. Quality design is pleasing on the eye, functional for a the user to navigate and it build confidence in your potential customer.

wrap that content with an excellent web design and you will have a winner.

[compendia]

softening the look by actually embedding a design into the themes.

would it possible to explain what you mean by this in practice - I'm very intrigued

Meg

[Suemoo]

Hi again

Wow! Thanks for all the kind comments.

I guess the site is more for people who already know about the sort of limited-run, designer toys we sell. The designer toy scene is usually tied to skateboard/rap/urban culture which we're not really into so we've tried to make the writing and overall tone of the site open to everyone. The designers and artists linked to the toy designs are very important and people do search for stuff by a certain illustrator/designer but we sell lots of toys as gifts as well.

I do know some HTML but I'm no expert so we've tried to concentrate on the things we think we can do reasonably well. I take the photos and my hubby does the graphics, then we both do the text.

Sorry if the banner is a bit big for some people looking on laptops. We also have a laptop but maybe we're a bit spoilt for screen space on a 17" powerbook. I can't say that I've had any complaints about it being too large from anyone else but I do see the point.

I also agree about the text colour. It could do with being a bit darker. We wanted to avoid harsh blacks but maybe we went a bit too far the other way.

I see the point about the frontpage (which then leads to the shop page). To be honest it doesn't really need to be there. Again it doesn't seem to have stopped or necessarily confuse people but it'd be worth thinking about that again.

Well, lots of stuff to think on. Eventually we'll probably have to think about a drop-down list of products rather than just a big list and there are always lots of other tweaks to do.

I'll probably be coming back for more advice soon!

Sue

[pinbrook]

Ok apologies in advance to the site owners of my examples - no offense is intended they are just the sites that come to mind as we have been discussing them recently

examples of Smart Theme deployment

stage 1 http://www.cardsatyourfingertips.co.uk is an example of pure actinic layout without design

stage 2 http://www.integratedlabels.co.uk and http://www.treatmentgels.co.uk have started the process with colour integration and logo design

stage 3 http://www.dinkybox.co.uk - takes it a stage further

stage 4 is a site where it isn't apparant which layout was used

[compendia]

Hi Jo and everyone else,

I'd like to take this a stage further, if anyone will come with me, so I'm starting another thread,

Meg

[george]

Thats actually a very good analysis Jo.