How we design with actinic

[compendia]

Hi, this is an extension of the beginning of a discussion that arose out of the the site critique for dinkybox.xo.uk. I'm interested in shifting the discussion a little from what a site design is, to what a site owner (or designer) does to acheive it.


During the discussion Jo at pinbrook said the following:


-quote-
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

-quote ends-

I'm interested by this idea that some sites are 'designed' and some are not. Perhaps we could put it this way:

1: Layout without design
Actinic has a number of layouts or themes which you can choose from when starting your site. Each of these site has a number of boxes which you fill in with your logo, text, product images. If all you do is fill in the boxes as prompted by actinic then you will get a functional site that is pretty good looking to the average user.

2: colour integration and logo design
Some site owners have begun to play around with certain settings that actinic makes it fairly easy to adjust. They have also begun to think more about how the files they put in; their logo and product images, match up with the elements that actinic has provided in the layout. The site owner has begun to try and create a more coherent feeling with their site.

3: A stage further
The site owner has begun to manipulate the page templates to make the store what they want it to look like. I think this stage encapsulates people like me who don't always completely understand what they are doing and can't always get the results they want. This is because we spend time running our sites rather than developing so knowledge has to be relearned all the time.

4:
Uses the actinic functionality but doesn't need the design the prompts that actinic provides to create the site, though they may have begun with them. This type of site is more liekly to have been created by a designer who consistently designs with actinic and has control over what they are doing most of the time. I run catalog, so I'm not in a position to say whether owning developer opens this option to more people.

The crucial question for most of us is whether a greater control over the design can create a more successful business.

I'd love to hear from anyone who is happy to share what they do when they build actinic stores, and if anyone has any stories about how design increased sales then of course I'm sure we'd all love to hear them.

I develop my site alone, I often sit down with a spare few hours and think that I would like to make the site better but am at a loss as to what to work on or how to do it. Its the specifics rather then the generalities that defeat me.

Any thoughts from anyone who has made it this far are all appreciated

[jont]

The 4 stages above are good example of the progress that can be made using Actinic - from stage 1 (out of the box) through to stage 4 (complete customisation).

Successful sites in my opinion are a complex blend of many factors - design, layout, navigation, ease of use, target audience, product mix, prices etc etc. Assuming someone actually finds your site design is the most obvious and vital element - judging the book by the cover. If it looks a mess or if it has been created by the "average" 8 year old for a school project then people a liable to hit the back button. Once people decide the design (layout) is acceptable then the other factors come into the mix with navigation being often over looked.

As users of Actinic and regular members on this forum we can generally spot Actinic stores at stage 1 and stage 2 a mile away and often at stage 3 if a regular and experienced Actinic user. Can the templates be spotted by regular users is open to debate and even a stage 1 design with careful use of colours and images etc be made to look very professional and interesting. There have been some excellent examples on here recently that used a standard theme and with good colour combinations look terrific.

When designing a site under Actinic I often spend several days with just a pad of paper and pencil to work on concepts, layouts and the overall "feel" the site / products need to do them justice. As I have a back list of varoius templates and layouts I know that when the design is sorted I can usually make Actinic fit the site. I also know that Actinic will work so all the scripts and cart functions etc can generally be left as-is to do their funky thing.

I have one site whose corporate colours were the oh-so fashionable orange and black from the mid-late 1990's. The site did OK but when the colours changed to be more in keeping with the products (dark blue) sales after a month were almost doubled! Nothing else had changed other than the colour scheme so the effects are directly attributable to the new colour.

[george]

Possibly the people with the `early stage` sites are those who have `learnt themselves` though, sometimes with no html training whatsoever. Progress will be made with those as ability and hands on feeling improves.

Taking a stage 1/2 site to 3 or definitely 4 maybe does need a learned persons help, although I have often wondered if the cost of paying a designer would be recouped with the extra sales you'd maybe expect.

My own one is a good example, maybe it needs to be taken to that next level by someone with more ability/imagination than me?

[compendia]

Its interesting that you start with pen and paper - since I do this with non actinic sites, but when it comes to my actinic site I always let myself be guided the layouts. Perhaps the pen and paper approach would lead me to a better site.

A case of; 'ask not what you can do for actinic...'

I do think actinic suffers a little from the photoshop curse. In a programme where you can do lots of different things if you don't know what you're doing its easy to get really lost.

I like your colour story - I've read so many of these and come to the conclusion that there's no magic colour that increases sales, just a colour change which enhances the site.

I must say I think orange can be a bad one (though I do use it) its become the colour of easijet.

[Luddite]

When we had our actinic site built we already had an existing non e-comms site that had been built by a local graphic designer based on our own drawings and ideas. Whilst the site was beautiful, it didn't really serve any great purpose so we wanted to incorporate the existing graphics, logo and colour scheme into an ecomms site, which is where actinic came in.

As we sell mainly designer accessories and home furnishings we had to make sure that our homepage was interesting enough to make our target market (many of whom are architects/designers themselves) want to stay on the site and remember us in the future. We think that we've now got a very nice looking website (thanks to the absent Gary at GWW) and many, many people comment on how good the homepage looks - in particular the main graphic in the centre and our logo.

The purpose of the large graphic on the homepage was to give the site a more intereactive feel without having to resort to flash or anything else that would slow the site down. We chose the colour scheme based on some research we did on colours. One of the comments that we read was that green was often interpreted as a comfortable, homely colour - which is partly why we went for it, the other being that we just really liked it!

My next challenge is to get the rest of the site to look as nice as the homepage as most of our customers come in 'through the back door' and so may not see the homepage.
I've got so much to learn!

Nick

[Luddite]

I do think actinic suffers a little from the photoshop curse.

What do you mean? Nick

[compendia]

You do have a fantastic looking site. It pulls the visitor in I think, I've seen it before and couldn't resist having a play.

The question about all pages being entry pages is a difficult one, at the moment my site is incredibly repetitive for this reason and I am thinking of taking a lot of that out.

The photoshop thing - I use photoshop elements and I love it. Much the functionality of photoshop is taken away, what this means for a user like me is that I don' spend hours trying to undo something that I don't know how I did it in the first place. Its easier to find help an explanations, mainly online, that will help me work out what I want to do.

I am self taught in nearly everything and photoshop is by far the most difficult programme I have ever come across for opening it up and figuring out how it works by using it.

Dreamweaver was almost as difficult - I went on a two day course and that got me up and running for that one. Excel is another culprit, very unituative I think.

Partly it has to do with language, where programmes create their own language they can be very difficult to work out.

I found actinic fairly simple to work out as a basic user - here are your products, here are your orders. But now I've got on to wanting to do some more difficult things I find there are barriers. For instance, I find it difficult to work out what all the page templates do and how they fit together to make the site. The elements within the templates can also be difficult.

I think this is partly because there are a lot of elements in the page layouts that I am not using but I'm afraid to touch - the photoshop curse.

I don't exepct it to be easy, after all web shopping is should be fairly complex, but I have become frustrated at how 'blocked' the program can be - there's just no way of working out what I want to do.

Except asking the forum of course, they are lovely and send me peices of code.

[Matt Kitchen]

Personally speaking I don't have the knowledge of Actinic yet to sit down & 'storyboard' my site. But I imagine it is probably the best way to go. After all how can you get the site to a finished product if you don't know where you're going?

I had to look to get the site up & running first as we had advertised it under the promise that it would be ready for the advert.
I have then added the rest of the site (in addition to the bookshop) with design guidance from a professional web designer.
The last stage has been to find a suitable layout & incorporate colour schemes & menus to match with the other part of the website.
Finally - & this goes for all of us I'm sure, you've got to tweek the site appearance & product layouts etc until you get what you are looking for. This is an ongoing task!!

What I do believe is that the look & feel of the booksite must match the rest of my site, otherwise potential customers will question if they have been 'hijacked' to another site or doubt your integrity. For those of you just focused on an online shop I would think that you have to produce a professional looking site which the customer is comfortable shopping in - no bright or vivid colours to take your eye off the products, blend it all in together.

[jont]

I found actinic fairly simple to work out as a basic user - here are your products, here are your orders. But now I've got on to wanting to do some more difficult things I find there are barriers. For instance, I find it difficult to work out what all the page templates do and how they fit together to make the site. The elements within the templates can also be difficult.

You have to take your hat off to Actinic in covering all levels of experience from out-of-the-box beginners through to totally hacking the templates to create a bespoke feel - very very few programs allow this level of customisation and many require very expensive plugins from 3rd party sources. Unlike Photoshop, Actinic can be as simple or complex as you require and even a complete novice can usually get a site up and running in just a few hours... especially considering the complexity of the background codes to handle orders, encryption etc.

Pen and paper ultimately saves a lot of valuable time and effort - it is like setting off on a 50 mile hike without first looking at a map - it then makes it far easier to fit Actinic to the design and not the other way around as you say.

[fleetwood]

I think it can be very easy to get bogged down with design over function.
The product works so well out of the box because it does a good job of allowing anyone with a good business idea, to set up and operate a shop quickly and easily, and obtain those all important search ratings with little need for outside 'professional' help (you need to put a fair bit of time and effort into learning about the product and reading the advance manuals, but its all there for the taking).

From there, all sites benefit from a certain degree of customisation, at the very least to give each site its own personality.

Beyond that, I think that a lot of the desire to go for the 'wow' factor of a slick, professional looking, super graphic site is partly ego boosting for the site owner and designer. How much impact a more professional look has on the buying (as opposed to the browsing) public, I think is questionable. Design is probably more important for a B2B site than B2C.

You only need to look at the big players to see what works and what dosen't.
Amazon - not exactly a state of the art web site design wise - but has all the functionality its customers require to make an informed purchase.
Compare with boo.com - the clothes shop site that famously went belly up and after spending a fortune designing the slickist looking site - yup, it looked great and I'm sure the professional designers gushed at how state of the art it was - but did it work as a shop?

We have what I consider to be a fairly basic site design wise - its beyond 'out of the box', but is not overly sofisticated, and its all my own work. The top of the list has always been to have the site operate easily and efficiently from the customers standpoint. Whilst I would like to have a more upmarket look, I think this may be more important to me (and my ego!) than to my customers, as well over 50% of the compliments we receive are for stock selection and ease of use of the site.

Functionality over design wins in my book every time.

[Luddite]

Functionality over design wins in my book every time.

I think its difficult to be this black & white as surely its got to be a healthy combination of both. Even the most functional of sites would hold no appeal to me if it didn't look like some degree of effort had gone into the presentation. Likewise, even the prettiest of sites will hack me off after a couple of bad links, bad navigation or endless flash.
You play to your market though don't you.

Of course the whole debate about whether a site is attractive or not is all rather subjective. Arsene Wenger once said of Alex Fergusons assertion that his team was the best in the country, "everyone thinks they've got the prettiest wife!"

[jont]

I think its difficult to be this black & white as surely its got to be a healthy combination of both.

Especially true with broadband connections becomming ever more popular and quicker allowing for greater design input - alas greater connections speeds should still not compromise functionality as Nick points out

[pinbrook]

Successful sites in my opinion are a complex blend of many factors - design, layout, navigation, ease of use, target audience, product mix, prices etc etc.

Different products require different approaches. All sites need their sites to have good navigation - what use is a site that no-one can find the products on and an eye on their target market.

Sites that have designer led products - clothes, dinkybox, steelcube for example will do better if their site includes "design"

Sites where your average purchaser doesn't give a jot about design don't have to have it - Football Heaven for example.

Compare dinky-box with jsd-miniatures, are they comparable products, are they comparable websites?

A site such as Amazon and e-buyer can get away with a functional site as they already have captured their audience by being the first or by being the cheapest - both these sites have "navigation".

As for how far can you take an actinic site, well you can take it as far as you want. But you must remember your own skills and limitations. As a shopkeeper you probably aren't going to also be a graphic designer and or a coder. A top of the range website is going to include elements from all three. The shopkeeper holds the purse strings to budget the project and to decide on the products to be sold and how to market, the artist comes up with the concept, the coder does the hard work.

So yes a shop keeper can produce a functional site which also looks good and works for their market, but unless the shopkeeper has a degree in graphic art and subsequently worked as a coder for a few years they probably aren't going to produce the kind of site we all go "wow" at without some kind of external help

[Luddite]

My own one is a good example, maybe it needs to be taken to that next level by someone with more ability/imagination than me?

I think you are doing yourself a huge disservice George.

[pinbrook]

In my opinion Football Heaven could do with a banner at the top of the page, but it doesn't need any thing else. Without the banner it is a stage 2 site, with a banner it would be a 2 1/2. It doesn't need to be anything more than this. It is right for its target market, has a good colour scheme, has navigation

______________

further thought - i'm not sure about the banner, the site is busy enough a banner may take it over the edge. I'm just not sure about the simple text though.