A bold, product-driven website for an Australian-owned household homewares giant

The client:
Décor is an Australian-owned homewares company that, for more than 50 years, has been making products that are beautiful, functional, affordable and made to last. The company originated in Melbourne in 1958 and has built its reputation on design excellence and product quality. Research and development is ongoing, with new products continually being introduced.

The trigger:
Décor recognised that they were not utilising the power of the internet with their previous website, so they put in place a strategy to enhance their site in order to communicate their vast product range to the online audience.

The journey:
DDG’s General Manager, Jim Thompson, explains the concept drivers for the project. “The Décor website project is a great example DDG’s communications alignment philosophy in practice. Décor’s business model is clearly a ‘transactor’ in that they sell products (though not on online), and lots of them,” he says. “It follows that their website should be product-driven with the various components seeking to provide easy and appealing access to specific product information. That premise underpinned the entire development journey, with all other elements flowing from there.”

The architecture phase examined how best to present information (including images) for around 500 individual products; how to counterpose a complicated, link-rich internal structure with a seemingly simple and streamlined user interface. “We put ourselves in the shoes of the visitor,” says Jim. “We imagined what they might be seeking when they come to the site, and how we can optimise their experience by getting them quickly and easily to their target.”

The solution:
DDG created a solution based on a sophisticated menu system that allows visitors to access (or search) site information from both a usage or sub-brand perspective. DDG’s Technical Director, Conal McClure explains, “Décor’s products are organised into several well-known sub-brands, but we identified that many visitors would seek information according to the way they used products. For example, in the kitchen for cleaning or for storage. So we built a fluid and dynamic menu system that ‘flicks around’ from usage to brand, from product menus to page menus, and back again.”

 This intricate menu system requires lots of hooks and inter-linking which are hidden away from the user, who enjoys an effortless navigation experience.

Other features of the solution include:

 A tailor-made Content Management System – with an ever-changing product range, it is critical that Décor can update content readily. They now have a system that lets them manage product information from an Excel spreadsheet. They simply enter the data, tabulating across the various columns and the information and images are automatically published on-line, integrating necessary menu links and uniformly populating existing pages.

Newsletter Subscription Module – supporting effective subscriber database management and targeted marketing

Search facility – site is fully searchable, right across the Décor product range

Professional photography – vibrant, high-quality images to showcase every product to its full potential

Home Page flash animation – an updatable, very visible target space that can be readily updated to align with national print media, catalogue and other advertising campaigns.

The benefits include:

• Alignment – congruency with business model, operations and marketing strategies
• Brand awareness – showcases the parent brand and the sub-brands in a visually exciting and confident style
• Streamlined catalogue – a central, searchable catalogue for every Décor product that is accessible 24/7 to an international audience
• Positioning – reinforces Décor’s position to suppliers, prospects, consumers and investors, as well as providing an internal product resource and focus
• Versatility – provides remarkable capacity for Décor to manage content internally and ensure an on-line offering that continues to reflect strong market positioning going forward.

The results so far:
The Décor website is just over a month old but Décor’s Product Designer, Vaughan Duck, reports that there is already positive feedback. He explains, “Our major stockists are saying how pleased they are to be able to readily browse our product range online. We are looking at strategies to drive traffic to the site, such as SEO (Search Engine Optimisation) and linking it in to our marketing campaigns. That will really get the stat’s bouncing.”

Check-out Décor’s new website at: www.decor.com.au