cultureblog

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.

We are thrilled to announce the launch of the newly redesigned Sauvage Swimwear website at www.sauvagewear.com!  Sauvage produces some  of the world’s most elegant and glamorous swimwear for women and men.  They came to us to produce an online showcase for their brand and a rich online experience for their customers.

We started by designing a clean user interface that focuses on showcasing the products in an effective and eye-catching way.  It can be difficult for design teams to create a website that is restrained and minimal, but when the products are as intricately designed and the photography is as stunning as Sauvage’s, those aspects must always take the center stage.  So with that in mind, we applied a classic look with a black, grey, and white palette and pinstripe lines as separators.  We used large images to maximize their effect, and let the products do most of the design “work.”

We applied this design in several ways to create a rich user experience for Sauvage.  The site begins with a Flash introduction, and then employs a javascript-based gallery, a MIVA Merchant shopping cart, and a WordPress platform for the company’s news and media features.  The result of using these different components is a multi-faceted experience of the Sauvage product line.  Customers can view products in a gallery without the additional information that a storefront provides, and they can then move into the MIVA shopping cart component of the site to learn more about the product, see additional views, and make a purchase.  As the customer moves from one area of the site to the next, the design elements remain the same to create a cohesive and seamless transition.  Our goal in constructing the site was to create an experience that was as close as possible to being in the front row on the runway and then walking right into the retail shop.

To create the retail-store experience for Sauvage’s online store, we customized their MIVA Merchant cart to allow for large imagery with a zoom option, alternate images, related products, products with several cuts that can be purchased as separates, a detailed and prominent size chart, a “favorites” section for shoppers, hassle-free shipping options with an order tracking feature for customers, and the ability to offer promotional codes at Sauvage’s discretion.  The result?  A comfortable shopping experience with a high level of detail.

It may be December, but it’s always swimsuit season with Sauvage.

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.

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.