Welcome back to project spotlight. We’ve delved back in Rawww time to reflect upon another past project in honour of our 10-year celebrations this year.
Did you catch our first spotlight blog? If you missed it, take a peek; it’s all about TravelBag, a long-haul holiday company, specialising in creating tailor-made holidays to destinations near and far. But, as soon as you have travelled through that blog, nip back here because we want to talk about beauty…
ESPA is the epitome of pure beauty. Their extensive ranges of face and body products contain only the very purest extracts. And because they are created in their spas for their spas, their use goes beyond a home skincare routine as they have been designed to give each and every user a spa experience at home through skincare that calms, refreshes and renews.
We enjoyed working with ESPA and our collaboration included email marketing, Christmas campaigns and designing a fully interactive spa locator that allows the user to browse through, and find, the spa of their choice with ease (which still features on the ESPA website today).
But for the purpose of this blog, we’re going to go right back to 2009 to talk about the e-commerce website project we worked on.
The brief
Our aim was to redesign and execute the B2C ESPA e-commerce website to showcase the ESPA products and services in an interactive and user-friendly way. As leading edge designers, we incorporated current website trends (at the time) and added that Rawww touch to create a site that was easy to use, attracted their target market, made people browse, and, most importantly, made people buy. Sales soon increased and we also helped highlight the inspiration of their spas across the UK and US.
How we did it
We collaborated closely with the client to ensure that the end-to-end shopping experience was as seamless as possible. Layouts for each page were carefully designed so that the style matched the latest ESPA guidelines for consistency between product and website. This also made it easily recognisable to consumers and businesses alike.
We also worked tirelessly on the design and front-end development so that they met ESPA’s standards, whilst adding an easy to use structure for consumers. For example, it’s important that any online payment process has clear, step-by-step instructions that consumers can follow with ease so they can make their payments without any problems, which, in turn, gives them a great user experience when buying their products. Our online payment process for ESPA delivered all this and more.
We made sure our designs were pixel perfect – and these were soon utilised in-house at ESPA too… integrated into the website accordingly under our close inspection.
We’re pleased to say that what we delivered translated to the end product as closely as possible, and provided ESPA with everything they needed to complete their e-commerce website to the highest standard whilst providing a positive user experience.
The technologies and processes
Before you read on, bear in mind that even though it was only six years ago, back in those days, we were only working our designs to accommodate desktop (no need for tablet and phone consideration back then). Our Photoshop files were 980-pixel width! Things were much easier in the desktop-only era weren’t they?
Some development familiarities were of course used including HTML, JavaScript and CSS… oh, and our old long-lost friend Flash…
Ah, Flash, it seems very ‘old school’ now, doesn’t it? But let’s not forget that at the time, Flash was a great way to bring any page or product to life through animation as HTML5 didn’t exist in those days!
Hard to believe, isn’t it?
We hope you enjoyed this month’s spotlight blog – we’re having a lot of fun dipping into our files and revisiting projects. Come back next month for another blog from back in the day, but don’t forget to stay with us in 2015 too for all our latest collaborations.
Until next time…
