Pod1 Blog

Pod1 is pleased to announce the launch of Echo:

Spanning almost 90 years, the Echo brand is synonymous for it’s use of color and patterns in everything it does.

Pod1 was tasked with creating a next generation e-commerce site for Echo. The brief was to enhance the brand experience online, improve the customer journey and upgrade the e-commerce platform.

Working closely with the brand, our UX and interaction designers created an innovative, layered navigational structure to the site, mirroring today’s touchscreen App experiences.

The site was also built using an adaptive layout so no matter how large or small your screen, you’ll get a great visual experience.

The same page on a wider screen:

As well as gloves, scarves and accessories, the site also caters to the Home category:

Other sections on the site include an editorial section:

A gift guide:

and brand story:

The techie bit: site was built on the Magento Enterprise platform as well as WordPress. Hosting is via the cloud at Rackspace.

Launching a new brand is never easy, and getting the right site design can be a process of evolution. So after 3 months of data, live user testing and working with the client on an efficient way to manage the site, we have re-imagined www.eloquii.com…well the homepage and the global footer that is!

Lovely.

(And if you’re curious, you can see the original designs here.)

We’re happy to announce that our work for Asda’s fashion brand George is now live on the world-wide-interweb!

Pod1 was tasked with overhauling the entire user experience for this hugely popular brand.

The George label provides cost effective fashion across all categories, from Women to School and Babies.

Custom pages were also created to allow for style tips and bespoke content.

Pod1’s clean approach was implemented across the site to ensure a simple user experience.

Large drop down navigation also cut clicks for faster access to content, and allowed for inline promotions.

The site was developed on the Demandware platform.

Last year mobile web usage increased 148% worldwide, so its high time that we offer a mobile optimised experience to our visitors. Not all of us has got the time and resources to invest in an independent mobile website. Here are few tags which can be used make existing websites ready for mobile:

The Viewport META tag

Use of <meta name="viewport" content="width=device-width"> with width media queries. That will give your site the optimal width and your site will look the better for the device.

The Viewport META tag controls the logical dimensions and scaling of the browser viewport window in many smartphone browsers, including Safari Mobile for the iPhone, Android browser and BlackBerry browsers. The presence of the Viewport META tag indicates that the markup document is optimized for mobile devices.

A typical mobile-optimized site should contain something like the following:

<meta name=”viewport” content=”width=device-width,initial-scale=1,maximum-scale=1“>

The width property controls the size of the viewport. It can be set to a specific number of pixels like width=600 or to the special value device-width value which is the width of the screen in CSS pixels at a scale of 100%. (There are corresponding height and device-height values, which may be useful for pages with elements that change size or position based on the viewport height.)

The initial-scale property controls the zoom level when the page is first loaded. The maximum-scale, minimum-scale, and user-scalable properties control how users are allowed to zoom the page in or out.

The MobileOptimized META Tag for IE:

Microsoft invented the MobileOptimized META tag to control the layout width for mobile markup rendered in Internet Explorer Mobile (i.e. Pocket IE). The content of the meta tag is an integer width in pixels. In IE Mobile, the presence of this META tag forces a single-column layout at the specified width, preventing the browser from modifying the layout to “fit” the mobile screen.

Some non-MS mobile browsers may also use the tag to force single-column layouts. Mobile browsers and mobile search engine spiders also use this META tag to identify mobile-optimized HTML.

The HandheldFriendly META Tag

The HandheldFriendly META tag  is widely interpreted by mobile browsers and spiders as an indicator of mobile markup and a directive to display the web document without scaling. The value of the META tag is “true” for mobile markup and “false” for desktop-optimized HTML.

<meta name="HandheldFriendly" content="true" />

We’re happy to announce our latest launch for Salvatore Ferragamo – the pre-order online only trunk show!

This important digital initiative marks the brand’s first venture into RTW (Ready-to-Wear)) e-commerce which will be available for pre-order on the site for a limited three week time period.

Unique in the luxury digital sector, Ferragamo’s online trunk show features a user-friendly styling tool where customers can create their own looks by mixing and matching pieces from the actual runway looks as designed by Creative Director Massimiliano Giornetti.

All user created looks are of course socially shareable through Facebook and Twitter.

Pod1 worked closely with the Ferragamo team throughout the entire process, from concept development to photography, design and final technical implementation.

Read more here:

Luxury Daily – Ferragamo breaks RTW ecommerce trunk show

Watch the Style Yourself video:

Salvatore-Ferragamo

Page Speed Service is the latest tool in Google’s armoury to help speed up the web.

1. You sign up and provide Google  with your serving and reference domains.
2. You send traffic to Page Speed Service by pointing your DNS CNAME entry to ghs.google.com.

Google serves requests received for your serving domain by fetching content from your reference domain and rewriting it.   Check it out here...

Choosing the right Facebook media channel to use for your business or client isn’t an easy task. Each one has its own use, and depending on what you want, social media will help you choose which you should be using.

Types of Facebook media channels:

Here is a quick break down of the key channels you should use:

1. Personal Profiles should just stay personal. There is no need to use this channel unless you are tying it into your brand via various other channels and methods. Profiles have more limitations than groups or pages.
2. Business or Fan Pages allow real organizations, businesses, celebrities and brands to communicate and build a stronger relationship, which will hopefully turn your fans into customers.
3. Groups provide a closed space for small groups of people to communicate about shared interests. In other words, Groups are a lot like clubs in normal life, and are generally used to reflect a common interest, rather than to represent your brand or business.
4. Applications provide greater personalization. This allows you to enhance the users experience with specific features and interact with the user while keeping them interested in your brand. The biggest problem is that most developers do not know how to utilize the functionality provided by Facebook, that can be used to interact with the user.

Looking at these main Facebook media channels, Groups and Pages will be your starting point when starting up.

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Myths often start as plausible ideas or one-off observations that grow and become ‘common knowledge’ as they virtually spread. Listed below are 5 of the most frequent user experience misconceptions explained.

UX is an option
In order to create a great experience for the user, User Experience needs to be present during all stages of the process. The UPA’s Designing the User Experience poster near Jakub’s desk best illustrates this.
www.mprove.de/

Usability testing is expensive
Steve Krug’s Rocket Surgery Made Easy, best describes the benefits of usability testing, and how fast and relatively cheap it can be. Come borrow a copy from our UX library!
www.sensible.com/rocket surgery

You are like your users
The launch of Google Buzz demonstrates this misconception. 20,000 Google employees were tested, and Buzz was still launched with features which generated loads of complaints.
www.usabilitytestinghowto.blogspot.com

Design is about making a website look good
“Design is not just what it looks like and feels like. Design is how it works.” – Steve Jobs
www.apple.com

People don’t scroll
Content above the fold will always get the most attention, but this doesn’t mean all content has to be squeezed to the top of the page. Just give the user a reason to scroll.
arrowwww.cxpartners.co.uk

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Following yesterday’s 15th annual webby official honoree selections, we’re proud to announce that Pod1 has been shortlisted twice for it’s work on the Harvey Nichols ecommerce website.

Best Visual Design – Aesthetic

Best Navigation/Structure

Well done peeps!

Two of the best interactive & shoppable look books I’ve seen online, brought to you by Ralph Lauren.   Beautifully creative and very user friendly.

The Ralph Lauren Women’s SS11 video look book is narrated by contributing editors, and allows you to skip to different outfits, add outfits to your favourites and shop the look without leaving the page.  So clean and easy!

And then we head over to the Children’s section for the extremely adorable and very charming RL Gang shoppable storybook adventure video, narrated by Uma Thurman.  Each character in the story has two looks that you can shop online.