We have just launched an e-Commerce website for startup baby clothing company LoveDee Baby Ltd. We designed their logo last year and are pleased to have been working with them again to produce a website from which they can sell their cool range of funky baby clothing and products.
Di and Dee (shop owners) were keen for the website to portray the right image to potential shoppers. It needed to be clean and uncluttered, and make sense to the user. The design is subtle and fairly minimal so as to put more emphasis on the products. White is the predominant colour used, with accents of green and pink sampled from the logo we created for them last year.
The LoveDee Baby site is content managed, allowing Di and Dee to edit any page or product, including adding descriptions, different sizes and colours for the garments and multiple images. As the site also stocks three other brands (aside from LoveDee’s own), it was built to allow different size charts to be dynamically pulled into each product page, depending on which brand the user is looking at. All products in the site also make use of a Javascript zoom effect, so that users can take a closer look at the product (without needing to open an annoying pop-up window), as can be seen on many top clothing and fashion sites around at the moment.
All order management takes place through the site’s back-end, which keeps track of which stage each order is at. Emails are automatically generated when orders are processed and moved along the order chain and all invoices and bills are archived for future reference.
LoveDee Baby have a strong social network, so the site makes use of this by offering users the chance to send links to friends or various social networking sites from within each product page. There are also links to their Facebook and Twitter accounts from the About Us page. They also have a page dedicated to their partners, stockists and friends – LoveDee Buddies. Pages like these are an excellent way for startups in particular to help eachother gain some exposure and increase their SEO opportunities.
LoveDee Baby are a testament to just how well social networking, business directories (such as Free Index and Touch Local) and SEO go hand in hand. Prior to launch, links to their (yet to be built) website could be seen all over the place (at time of writing). Quick Google searches for “Baby clothing bromley”, “Baby clothing beckenham”, “Baby clothing epsom” and “Baby clothing ewell” all returned LoveDee Baby as one of the top 5 spots – if not the top – of Google’s Local Businesses as well as links to their Facebook page and Twitter account. For a startup looking to break into the market, having these presences will really benefit them now their site is live.
"Finding a web designer that could create a credible e-commerce website that avoided having the "produced from a box feel" at a cost that is favourable to a small start up company was very important to us. In addition to this, providing a high level of customer service, advice, support, a good ear and eye to listen and transfer our amateur drawings, scattered thoughts and designs into what we have today is exactly what we achieved by working with White Heat Design.
Xavier has played and continues to play a very important part in our company. To date, from discussions had with other small businesses, we know that we have definitely found a company that has gone the extra mile to help guide us and achieve our goal, especially with regards to his objective view in steering us in the right direction on ideas that we wanted to implement but in practice would be neither practicable or beneficial to our website, thus saving us valuable time and money.
Since our site launched in July 2010 feedback so far has been nothing but positive - "very professional", "looks amazing and definitely has the big company feel". These comments and more like them, together with the excellent professional relationship we have with Xavier, has sealed the deal on our relationship with White Heat Design continuing for a very long time ahead."
