Website Reviews 05 Dec

Welcome to Digital Strategy Website Reviews, showing some interesting things from the world of Digital. Again, these examples are intended to inspire thinking by showing how brands are communicating with their customers. There are many ways of engaging customers in digital media and sometimes other brands from very different sectors may have something new to teach us. Hopefully you find these interesting. Thoughts and ideas for inclusion are very welcome.

Fixture Ferrets
www.fixtureferrets.co.uk

This is a UK site which provides consumers with deals and discounts operating at the main Supermarkets. The site aggregates offers from the various providers and presents the information through one site. So, if you want to know who is offering, for example, 2 for £3 deals on 1 Litre Tropicana, this week, Fixture Ferret can tell you (Asda, by the way). It covers the usual suspects in terms of Supermarkets and also in terms of offer type with Buy One, Get One Free (BOGOF), Three for Two, Two For, Three For, etc all covered. There is a strong incentive to register on the site because the non-registered service provides only a sample of the deals available (those with a saving of £1.00 or less) and makes a strong call to action to register.

So, I now know that Muller Rice is on BOGOF at Sainsbury’s this week. Yum!

Jamie Oliver
www.jamieoliver.com

Two reasons for including Jamie Oliver’s site in this review. Firstly, the site is impressive: great design, loads of content, up to date and personal – it feels like Jamie is talking to me. Of course if you don’t like your copy peppered (see what I did there?) with “chuffed”, “mate” and “splodge” it may not be for you. The second reason for including the site is to note that one of my colleagues from my last job, a really talented Digital Designer – Robbie Lockie has just joined the team at Jamie Oliver and I look forward to seeing his design talents taking this site to the next level.

Back to the site – the content is really superb – rich media, blogs, recent pics (at the time of writing – Thu lunchtime – the site has a pic from Thu morning) and the site works really hard to create subtle commercial angles without spreading (did it again) ads all over the site. As with the Fixture Ferret site, some content (recipes) for all, more for registered users.

Money Supermarket - Shopping
www.moneysupermarket.com/shopping

On one level this is just one more dreary price comparison site with as much content as you can possibly squeeze onto the home page - categories, reviews, hero products, ads, etc. Right out of “White Space is Evil” school of design. But wait, there is something rather interesting about this site. Or rather, the awareness marketing of it. They’ve introduced a 50” touch screen display in a shop window on London’s Oxford Street. This allows harassed consumers to check out which retailer has the best price of more than a million products. Consumer product reviews (where available) and product specs will also be displayed.

Other online brands have experimented with offline displays, for example eBay tested kiosks at railway stations and Shopping Centres. This is a nice idea but I wonder about availability of the service with only one screen and not sure if I fancy queuing to use the service and then the rest of Oxford Street witnessing my results for “Jewellery Boxes” showing Forzieri Horse Shoe Sterling Silver & Wood Jewellery Box in position one.

Debenhams
www.debenhams.com

Right out of the “And you think you’ve got problems” letterbox, comes a report from Internet Retailing which reports on the responsiveness and reliability of top online retailers. With average reliability performance ranging between 97% and 100% for most, Debenhams comes in at a shocking 28%, after the collapse of their site last week. HMV was recorded as the least responsive and House of Fraser as the most responsive (and also the most available).

Back to the Debenhams site, and whilst they are lying on the ground, how about we give them a kick? Well, the site just screams DISCOUNT and it seems no point size is too large for a 20% off signal. Seems the designers played the “How many text styles can we fit on one page” game.

Once you get away from the promotions, the shopping cart element is nicely designed (not in John Lewis league, perhaps, but nicely done) with clear information, alternatives, customer reviews and clear product specs. Overall a comprehensive site with a nice cart application but the home page is a mess and the category master pages uninspiring.