cultureblog

What kind of additional value or experience do you provide to your customers? This is a question that everyone in business should be asking themselves on a daily basis.  With the amount of competition out there anything extra that you can possibly do will help you get a leg up. The funny thing is that many people feel that creating a unique experience to their customers on-line is not an important part of their business model. This couldn’t be further from the truth. Not only is it important to take pride in your on-line business, it’s a necessity. When potential customer’s visit your site do they leave feeling like they wasted their time or do they leave feeling as if they just experienced something fun, entertaining, educational, or unique. When they get these great experiences they are more apt to not only stay on your site and buy but also to return and refer their friends and colleagues onto your business. First impressions are so vital to the interaction with your customers. If you had lights out in your store or chipped paint would you leave it that way or would you take pride in your space and invest in improvements so that your customers enjoyed their overall experience. Walt Disney got his inspiration for Disney Land when he used to visit the carousel on the Santa Monica Pier. He was always fascinated with the way it looked at night. When all the horses would be jumping up and down with all the lights twinkling and the music playing he found the carousel to be magical. When it stopped he noticed that only some of the horses actually moved and that the paint on them was chipped and worn down. From this he developed his vision for Disney Land, that all the horses would jump and there would be no chipped paint.

Lastly in order to create that great experience you can’t stop visually, there has to be great functionality and flow. Just as you wouldn’t crowd your store with racks and shelves that are hard to maneuver around you shouldn’t want your on-line business to overly busy and cumbersome. The flow of it should be easy for the customer. Easy to find information and have questions answered, easy for them to get to specific product pages and most importantly easy for them to check out. So much business is lost abandoning the cart because your visitors find it tedious and difficult to look at and navigate through your site. Think back to anytime you have been in a purchasing situation, the good, the bad, and the ugly. The ones that you that gave you the best experience you usually feel good making the decision to buy. The ones that gave you the bad experience you usually regret making that purchase. The two go hand and hand. When you add something more to the buying experience you not only will add to your revenue stream but the more repeat business you will receive. Remember that the investment you put into your online presence will produce the type of return you receive.

We’re pleased to announce the launch of the newly redesigned The Brittle Company website at www.lavacrunch.com! The Brittle Company, whose website is named after its star product—a light and crunchy macadamia nut brittle—produces gourmet candy and is distributed in fine specialty food shops nationwide.

If it hadn’t been for the 2008 economic meltdown on Wall Street, Lois Basiger may have never found her passion in the brittle business. The abrupt halt in the corporate finance world, where she had worked for 30 years, gave her the chance to explore other business opportunities. Namely, the specialty food business! Together with her friend Judy, they formed T.U. Roberta (Thank You, Roberta), named after Judy’s mom and the creator of the delicious LavaCrunch and Gold Country Crunch recipes.

Lois came to Durrani to redesign and develop a site where existing and potential wholesale customers could come to learn about her product and buy her products through a MIVA Merchant shopping cart. We gave The Brittle Company a new logo, applying a wooden, Old West theme and integrated a design that reflected the warm colors of her existing branding. The global footer illustrates the company’s two products—the foliage represents the island-themed LavaCrunch, while the golden foothills represent the Old Western-themed Gold Country Crunch. The site structure is easy to navigate, and incorporates a unique restricted area for wholesalers to access pricing and additional materials which remain hidden from competitors and the general public. But Lois is so pleased with her new site, that she’s already thinking of expanding her e-commerce store to include a retail section to capture a wider audience. We like that!

In the day to day hustle and bustle of running your own online business, it’s important to periodically go through your own website and ensure that things are in proper order. Just as you would with any retail business, it’s important to “walk the showroom floor”, so to speak and make sure that the things you depend on to operate your business are functioning correctly. With your online store, you should go through every step of your checkout process and actually run a live dollar transaction to make sure that everything works and also that your customer experience is the way it should be. Things are constantly changing online – new web browsers get released and updated, website hosting servers get patched, security subscriptions expire etc, and these changes can cause formatting errors, popup security alerts and even broken pages and checkout problems. Very often these problems could be occurring for days or even weeks before you find out. Don’t rely on your customer to take time out of their busy day to notify you of any errors they encounter.

This is especially important if you have employees making continuous updates to your website content. Most shopping cart platforms, including MIVA Merchant, have global headers and footers for content that is included on every page of the site, such as your site navigation links, footer information and promotional banners. This content is being delivered to the web browser when a visitor is on both non-secure pages as well as on secure pages, such as when in the checkout process. As the global areas of your site get updated with new content, you need to make sure the links to banners or security badges or any tracking codes are created correctly so that they are accessible on every page in the website and do not cause security alerts or broken images.

Of course, having a reliable and professional development support team handling your store maintenance and website updates will minimize any shopping cart problems, but it’s always smart business to be hands-on with your online store. Even in the absence of any technical problems, it’s still a good idea to run through things and keep the customer experience fresh and up-to-date. Never just assume that if your shopping cart worked ok yesterday, it still will today. Check, check and triple check.

Durrani Design is excited to announce the launch of the new website for Gregg Visintainer at vizisart.com! Self-taught artist Gregg Visinitainer, whose artistic alias is Viz, creates highly detailed pieces of artwork, using only pen and ink. Within each one of these sophisticated doodles, which are Viz’s signature style, there are hidden pictures, words and messages that all reflect a larger theme.

In the last year, Viz has been gaining recognition and momentum in the San Diego community. He recognized it was time for an updated, fresh web presence and a home to sell his prints online. He came to Durrani to redesign and develop a professional site that would give him an online showcase for his art, while also utilizing a MIVA Merchant e-commerce platform.

We were challenged to create a strong e-commerce site, but also showcase a product that is personal and reflective of the artist’s taste and talent. We applied a dark, clean design to highlight Viz’s art without taking away from his colorful, intricate pieces and created the Online Store to have the look and feel of a gallery. Durrani’s goal was to make it is as easy to purchase Viz’s art as it is to browse through his prints—giving users an effortless, pleasurable online shopping experience. We’ve successfully captured Viz’s artistic personality while also providing him with an efficient shopping cart—fitting for a progressive artist in the 21st century.

Durrani is excited to announce that AirVerter, a leader in the industrial spray finishing manufacturing and distributing market, is teaming up with us for their website redesign and development project!

AirVerter’s advanced technology and innovative spray gun designs have made them a favorite among aviation and marine industry painting professionals for over 25 years. Their strong focus on worker safety and environmental solutions has set them apart from competitors throughout their history, but now they’re ready to utilize a MIVA Merchant shopping cart to allow for direct purchases online. With hundreds of parts for each spray gun to choose from, we’ll be creating a custom cart that’s tailored to make the purchasing process effortless for both the customer and AirVerter.

We’re looking forward to working with Bill, Mike and the rest of the AirVerter team to take their business to the next level!

The Restaurant Depot is one of the nation’s largest restaurant suppliers, with over 70 warehouse locations nationwide. But in order to truly compete in this modern digital age, you have to be represented online. That’s where the partnership between Durrani and The Restaurant Depot was launched. We’ve been with them from the beginning, designing and developing their first online storefront with MIVA Merchant version 4 and recently embarked on a design overhaul and major migration upgrade to MIVA Merchant 5.5. MIVA 5.5 provides online merchants with a ton of flexibility and expansion opportunity. The Restaurant Depot, online at TheRDStore.com, relies on Durrani to support their online store and product database of almost 10,000 products – one of the largest online restaurant equipment and supply retailers. 

 
But we didn’t stop with just their main online store. The latest and most exciting development with Restaurant Depot has been the creation of several prototype in-store kiosks, which feature a cloned version of their primary website and allow customers to easily search for available products both in store and online. This gives customers a much wider choice of equipment and supply items then just their local neighborhood warehouse can provide. If the Kiosk prototypes are successful, Restaurant Depot hopes to roll them out to most of their regional stores.  For us at Durrani, this project was a huge success for many reasons – one of which is that it demonstrates the strength of the MIVA Merchant e-commerce platform. Clients always ask us if MIVA is the right choice for their business and The RD Store is a great example that shows MIVA can keep up with the best of them and perform at an enterprise-level that will grow as big and as fast as your business.

With the launch of the new Durrani online retail division, S.A.W., we have had to take all of the advice we’ve given clients through the years about e-commerce and put it into practice in a very real way.  We always tell clients to stay in touch with their customer and their industry, and stay ahead of the curve when it comes to new trends, products, and techniques.  Since tradeshows are often a great way to do this, this weekend meant a trip to the Action Sports Retailer (ASR) show in downtown San Diego for the Durrani / S.A.W. team. 

In the Action Sports apparel industry, ASR is THE place to be, as it showcases products from over 700 brands in the action sports fashion and streetwear industry and promises to "ensure the growth of your customer base and keep your current customer satisfied."  It’s a place to check out new product lines, get a feel for the way the industry is trending, get some face-time in with the brands we already carry and forge relationships with those we’d like to carry.  Michaela McNamara, lead buyer for S.A.W., said,

"Meeting with others in the action sports retail community and networking are invaluable to our business.  The biannual ASR show is a great opportunity to see what products and trends will be a hit next season. It gives us a chance to forecast our purchases and determine the direction we’d like to take S.A.W." 

Some of the people and brands we were introduced to over the weekend include: Andre Sickinger with Filtrate Eyewear, an Australian sunglasses brand breaking into the US market; Ryan Farrelly, co-founder of Freeline, a company that invented and sells custom skates designed to give the feeling of skateboarding, snowboarding and surfing all in one; Malan Lai, owner of Laiph (pronounced Life), a Hawaiian brand that is dedicated to surfing, the ocean, and the outdoors. Their music, art and surfing influences are translated into their t-shirt, boardshorts and hoodie designs; and Ryan Davis with Spacecraft, an eco-friendly brand that specializes in handmade beanies that are knitted by local Indonesians in their villages.  These are some of the newer brands we’d like to incorporate into S.A.W.’s product line in the near future.  Check out S.A.W. online at www.skullsandwings.com

We were recently quoted in the September 10th issue of the online newsletter Ecommerce Notes, by Practical Ecommerce. This is something we stress to clients all the time. Sometimes in the rush to get their site designed and launched, many overlook just the simple basics like having solid product descriptions and clear images.

“Image is everything and online shoppers need to come as close to touching and feeling a product as possible. You need to overcome the obstacle of customers not being able to experience your product, like they can in a retail store. Take time to present your products in the best possible way with clear and vibrant images and accurate descriptions."

Joe McDonald, Managing Partner, Durrani Design

Click here to view the full newsletter and learn more about Practical Ecommerce.

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.