Web Development and Design: Royal Doulton
The Royal Doulton redesign was undertaken by Monica Worthington, Senior Web
Developer and Designer at Cheshire Studios, as a then full-time employee of
Royal Doulton. It was a very large undertaking, as the site went from a static
FrontPage site with Actinic backend to a modern, standards-compliant site
using the Blue Martini e-commerce platform.
This is a screenshot of the old site, which was not accessible, not optimised for search, and was not dynamic.
The redesign took several steps:
1. Changes in the information architecture of the site. How would the massive amount of product skus be broken up for simplicity of navigation and best usability? Alternate browse paths through the site were created, allowing different types of shopper to have an experience best suited to their different needs.
2. At the same time, mockups were created for the "look and feel" of the site, in line with the branding objectives of the company as a whole. Extensive research was done into current best practice of top e-commerce sites, and an overall design was gradually created that 1) felt like a best-of-breed e-commerce site, 2) best exemplified the brand image, which would be translated over several different channels: web, retail, and direct mail/catalogue.
3. Templates were designed, and re-designed, to promote the optimal ease of use across the site. The jsp templates were coded as hybrid CSS/HTML pages, in order to be most accessible cross-browser and cross-platform. Pute CSS layout was used wherever possible, using tables only where necessary.
4. Then the massive job of building in all product began, as well as the creation of product assortments, content areas, and marketing/merchandising areas. Much work was done in SEO, optimising the various meta tags and all visible titles and copy.
We were very pleased with the results, and improvements and enhancements are ongoing. The new homepage, for example, is designed to showcase the luxury and elegance of Royal Doulton bone china, as well as promote the message that the company is strong in a number of other areas, such as collectibles and home giftware.
All elements of the site are multilingual, allowing Doulton to meet the individual needs of the different site locales - a neccessity for a multinational site.
And the result?
