e-timpa.com

I was contracted to update the web presence for Totally Hot, a swimwear company based here in Brisbane, Australia. Now this is no small fish, they have an enormous range of products (all designed and made locally) and the owner was One of the 10 young people to watch for 2008 (Courier Mail) and an RAQ fashion award winner. So this seemed a mighty challenge.

First step in the project was to change the site away from it’s standard template style. The biggest change needed was the colour scheme. As much as the sunset image works perfectly for swimwear, the sites original designer had gotten a little heavy handed with shades of red and orange. I immediately switched the site to black and redesigned the header and footer to blend more.
A couple of changes to the template files suddenly had the site at a fixed width and displaying images in rows.
For some as yet unknown reason Cubecart displays images one per line, which leaves lots of room for descriptive text, but let’s face it. For most people products sell based on a look. Once you see something you like, a click is all it takes to get the full description happening.

The site also originally landed on a welcome page. In the interests of good service, this was removed via .htaccess redirect to push customers directly into the site. If you’re here to sell products, let’s push the products up front.

Next change into the site was to design a ’style’ for the front page and create the image seen. It is simply embedded directly into the code for the frontpage and can be changed easily. The weblink from the image is actually to a search results page which searches for a keyword.

This ingenius step was added because Cubecart does not allow for multiple categories per item and has no tagging system. IE once an item is classified as a ‘bikini’ there is no way to have subcategories or to place some of the items into groups for specific styles and seasons. Hiding keywords on the page in a background colour and then linking to a page that searches for them allowed a quick and simple change to allow categories and groups that span all of the existing categories.

Total changes and optimisations done to the site took a little over 2 weeks on and off, and apart from some ongoing maintenance and search engine optimisation, Totally Hot has been pushed higher in the search results and is a better experience for it’s clients.
Stop by to have a look and be sure to let them know how much you love the site.

Timps.