cultureblog

We’re excited to announce the launch of our latest web design project at ZENsei.com. ZENsei, a fellow local Encinitas business, joined Durrani as a client in the fall of 2008. At that time, they were struggling underneath the burden of an online store that was difficult to maintain and update, where months would go by before they were able get new product clothing lines posted on the site. They also wanted to create a fresh new Flash introduction to really showcase the rich details of their fashions. As we’ve said before, image is everything and online shoppers need to come as close to touching and feeling a product as possible or else you won’t get the sale. As an online retailer, you need to overcome the obstacle of your customers not being able to experience your product like they can in a retail store.

We started by creating a large expanding view flash runway for each of their seasonal collections to show each item in multiple full-size detailed views. This allows customers to really get in and experience the fashion. After launching the flash runway, we went right in to work on redesigning the website to match.

Part of the problem with the original ZENsei website was that it was built in osCommerce. Now, we’ve used osCommerce ourselves and it is a popular open-source shopping cart platform but, in our experience, for every benefit it has from being free and open source, there are equally as many negatives for maintaining it and trying to build a business with it. We’ll save the osCommerce versus other systems discussion for another day, but for ZENsei we put them into our favorite shopping cart of choice, MIVA Merchant 5.5. MIVA is an extremely extendable and expandable system will grow with any size company. The source design templates are simple to work with and maintaining the integrity of the core system files and maintaining security is much much more efficient.

So, after a few months of work, we have now launched the new website. At Durrani we are firm believers in rapid application development, which simply means getting the site up quickly so it is functional, operational and making money (or serving the other business goals you have set). You can always polish the look and tweak the fonts and colors and graphics once the site is live, but all to often, sites get delayed for too long to get things just perfect. Of course, we don’t ever want to merely launch buggy or poor quality work, but there is a right time to go live and we get there quickly. 

The economy is bad and continues to get worse. This is no time for businesses to roll into a ball and crawl under a rock. The marketing work you do now and plans you put in place will all be much stronger when the economy bounces back.

We invite you to sit back, relax and browse through the NEW ZENsei.com.