10 April 2006: The Ideal Kitchen Company is a kitchen design studio specialising in quality kitchens and with a long history of customer satisfaction and delivering long lasting, good looking kitchens.
The look and feel of this site was dictated by the company's logo, stationery and shop-front which are based on the company colours of black and gold. This is a bit heavy on-screen so I used flashes of blue (the opposite colour to the gold) to bring it to life a little.
It's a simple site aimed at generating interest from the local area. There are two scenarios we aimed at. The first was to capture people looking for kitchen studios around Huddersfield. The second was to provide backup to those people who are about to purchase from The Ideal Kitchen Company and are just doing their final checks .. all based on Neil Rackham's theories of the psychology of major sales.
I had doubts about the black border but no-one I tested it with saw any problems. Nevertheless I sparkled it up a bit .. black granite (as used in kitchen worktops) often has a sparkle.
I didn't want to use just catalogue photographs, I wanted people to know what was actually in the showroom, so on a sunny day I took the showroom photographs.
The site went through user testing using some of my testers. The about us page came from that .. someone said they'd want to know about the people they are buying from. The photograph on that page really makes it all a little more human. User testing always comes up with such good ideas.
Testing also raised the issue of how long the photograph-heavy pages took to load. I think that's not as relevant as it was. Sure, only maybe a third of us are on broadband, but for the rest the pictures load in order so they are loading as you browse, and at least you can make a coffee while you wait. The alternative .. providing thumbnails and asking people to click on those they liked, feels like a) too much faff/hard work for the user .. all that clicking, and b) it doesn't result in a page you can print out (and discuss or write prices and comments on).
I don't find much call for image maps but the customer quotes 'wall' is a nice application of those and again, the more human we can make it, the better.
The site was created in 55 hours over 8 elapsed months (I was working on other things for this client, so that was OK) at a cost of about £2,400 which, yes, is a fair amount of money but probably half that time was spent producing the materials .. the words, the photographs, scanning all the happy quotes .. before I could actually build the website. The client said yes, we like it, when's it going live?
Now I have to market the site and make it pay!