I thought I’d provide a sneak peek of what will be unveiled as our website design for Eliot Turner Ltd in a about a week from now. In my previous posts about “Our Brand” you will see how our website will sit nicely alongside all our other materials. I don’t want to spoil the surprise on the 1st of February so we’re not giving much away.

We did produce an initial design last summer, but then went back to the drawing board as we needed to think more carefully about our brand values. You can see our original sneak peek design by clicking here. We promise this is the final design and we’re sticking with it, at least for a few months!

In a recent post I discussed our brand values and why they were important to consider before designing a logo for Eliot Turner Ltd. As some of the more observant readers of the blog will have noticed we recently changed our holding page which revealed our final brand design.

It is important to remember that although the logo is what most people associate as being a brand, it is only the first part of a branding process and must be reflected correctly across all associated marketing literature. Some of the areas we considered are:

• Logo Design
• Stationery Design
• Order and delivery confirmations
• Email Signatures
• Printed marketing literature
• Email mailshot design
• Advertsing both online and offline
• Packaging

All these items are different methods of marketing / communication, which will reflect our brand. We used our company colours as the primary way to create brand recognition. You can see from the Eliot Turner Twitter page we have even made sure we have correct brand alignment. Our brand goes beyond colour but into the quality of the packaging, what paper we use for printing and how we word our communication.

Here are a few items of our branding which should give you an idea of how things are looking:

Check back later this afternoon when we’ll be revealing a sneak peek of our website!

Following usability guidelines for your eCommerce site are obviously important. Design aspects of your website such as quick downloading, easy navigation and interaction with no ambiguity trigger sales, however selling to foreign markets requires extra consideration. An eCommerce site that only focuses on their target audience in one country cannot exploit the internet’s global reach and many eCommerce sites are losing much overseas business due to the usability of their site to international customers. Foreign consumers may have heard about your site and are able to find it easily but any marketing employed by your business will be wasted if they cannot connect with the content on your site, preferring instead to use a local site. Research has suggested that internet users are four times more likely to purchase from a website that communicates in their own language and over 50% of web users speak a native language other than English so connecting to these non English speaking countries will potentially double your audience and hopefully double your sales!

Localisation refers to designing your website in a way that can be adapted for and is appropriate to international customers. Taking into account language and cultural differences will allow you to communicate with more customers worldwide and increase sales. Applications can be localised to different levels depending on the user group or culture you expect to use your site. You may wish to keep the content of your site the same but translate local measures such as currency or time or you may decide to translate the product text and terminology to suit the appropriate country. Some eCommerce sites even go as far to change colours, images and symbols to suit the target culture as customers perceptions of service quality differ from country to country. For example, The colour red means error, stop or warning in western culture however this isn’t the case for Asian countries. In pursuing a global market, businesses should be sensitive to elements such as this. If you understand their local cultures, how they use technology and their expectations you will most likely be successful in selling to them.

Even simple differences between variants of English can make or break a sale. For example, British English and American English obviously differ with British using shopping basket and Americans preferring shopping cart and spelling variations such as colour and color. Customers who recognize that the site is based abroad will become less trusting of it, hence less likely to purchase from it. This isn’t a case of automatic translation but researching your target markets expectations and customs.

When did you last check your eCommerce site for these issues? Can you get more sales from applying simple changes?

Competitor analysis involves learning more about the businesses that function around the same target demographic as you enabling you to assess their strengths and weaknesses whilst identifying opportunities and threats to your own business.

Often businesses become obsessed with competitor analysis whilst others can ignore what their competitors are doing completely. A healthy medium would be to track competition, react to changes but focus on your own plans.  After identifying the main competition in the market, it is useful to recognize the threats they pose, their company objectives and strategies and their weaknesses, this can only add to the strength of your own business.

It is useful to create a competitor profile for each of your competitors as it enables you to gather all relevant information in one place allowing you to formulate an effective strategy to implement, monitor and adjust where needed. Competitor profiles include their background, financials, products, marketing, facilities, personnel and corporate and marketing strategies. Knowing your competition’s planned strategies allows you to plan a response through your own strategy whilst at the same time revealing strategic weaknesses.

We have identified accessorize as the main market leader for this type of jewellery, however there are many that sell handmade jewellery offering similar products to Eliot Turner that are certainly market competition.

Here are the ones I have identified as the biggest competition:

The Spotty Dog Shop

Lisa's Handmade Jewellery

FarFallina

Purple Label

Pia Jewellery

Silver Wire Designs

We plan to create competitor profiles for our competition; however, we do not want to concentrate too much on what our competition is doing instead focusing our time and energy on our own plans.

On Monday 29th June, Justin and I spoke at the SuperMondays event held at Newcastle University about the eCommerce experiment to a crowd of approximately 40 people. Thanks to Ross Cooney for inviting us to take part.

I’ve been trying to keep the design under wraps as much as I could but there always comes a point when you need feedback from other people. So the guys have seen the full design and will be providing feedback over the next couple of days. We’ll be looking into various other ecommerce sites and looking at structure to do with the UX.

But for now, I’ll leave you with a sneak peak of Eliot Turner.

I’m currently working on the “mid” section of the design and will be showing some more sneak peaks very soon. Feedback is more than appreciated even at this very early stage.

I believe that any business with clear goals which everyone in the organisation is working to will always succeed. We sat down as a team to discuss the goals for Eliot Turner for the coming year.

We decided to set 5 realistic goals which are:

1.      Achieve a turnover of £100,000 in the first year of trading
2.      Develop 1000 unique daily  visitors to the website by the end of the first year
3.      Primarily use social networking to build the business
4.      Build a brand which can be trusted on both a national and international market place
5.      Diversify into two other market areas by the end of year one. Initial ideas have been handbags, hats, beauty products and designer clothes

Looking beyond this it is worth to mention that one of our long term goals is to create a £1 million turnover by the end of year three.