Digital Frame Company
DFC is a new business selling a fairly new product. Digital photo frames store a large number of digital photos, and display either a single photo or a slideshow of all the photos. The site's primary purpose was e-commerce, but because the technology is relatively new, DFC also wanted their site to offer plenty of information about digital photo frames, to distinguish his site from his competitors and give his customers a little extra.
As always, we gave careful thought to the structure of the shopping part of the site. Many digital frame sites categorise their products by size because that's the way the manufacturers categorise them. However, it's crucial in web design to structure a site according to the needs and expectations of your customers, rather than your own, and it seemed to me that frame size would mean little to most shoppers. I felt they would be more interested in the style of the frame. A little research on sites selling conventional picture frames revealed that in fact they did tend to categorise by style, which seemed to support my theory. So, we settled on style for the main product categories; but we felt it was important that it also should be possible to browse by size or by price. To save space and keep the menu simple, these are offered in dropdowns. A secondary menu offers the information options, linking to pages with useful facts and details about digital frames.
A small movie on the front page illustrates the unique appeal of digital frames - their slideshow effect, which allows you to display a range of your favourite photos. I created this in flash, using one of DFC's product shots and some stock photos.
The site is powered by FL1's Evolution e-commerce and content management software. We adapted it to allow a few pieces of custom content such as technical specifications. DFC can maintain both their products and their content themselves. The shopping cart is handled through RomanCart and various payment gateways, with custom-created templates.
My involvement
This project was undertaken during my time at FL1 Solutions. I designed the site, built the wireframes, and connected them to the Evolution software. The logo was a collaboration: the circular logo is mine, but DFC wanted to add the little frames around the lettering which came from a logo suggested by their print designer.
Screenshots:
