SOLE Blog

April 11th, 2012

Spring Cleaning Also Includes Our Website

Spring is here and it's not only time for a fresh product line, but a refreshed SOLE website. It's been a little over 2 years since we've had a significant change to the design of our website, so we thought we'd shuffle things up for a number of reasons.

Why the New Design?

• A fresh look which incorporates updated branding and artwork.
• Improved usability across the website for a better user experience.
• A new Help section to support our Customer Service efforts.

Our New Look

The biggest design change you'll see is the new header of our website. We wanted to tie in some of our latest artwork to give it a more unified feel. You'll notice the texture in the background of the header matches the texture you'll see on some of our new 2012 footwear. Internally we refer to this as the "cloud" texture and it's a corner stone of our branding moving forward.

Improved Usability

One of the biggest complaints about the current website I constantly hear is that it is confusing to navigate. Why have a product section and a store section, with a duplicate page for each individual product? Good question! We've gone ahead and removed the product section from the website. We've taken all the relevant content from the product pages and combined it with our store for a new mega-fantastic product page! Basically, there's only one page per product on the website, which will make things easier to find.

Combining the product and store pages is definitely the biggest change on the refreshed website. However, we have introduced a few other improvements, like moving the product categories (Custom Footbeds, Custom Footwear, and Performance Socks) to the main navigation. This will allow you to get to the products more quickly. We also removed a few lower-traffic pages which will make the website easier to navigate.

New Help Section

One of the main priorities for me in this update was to improve our customer service efforts online. SOLE continuously strives to be a leader in customer service, and our online support page wasn't living up to what our customers deserve. If you head over to our Help section, you'll notice all the pages listed down the left-hand side of the page. There you'll find common questions and answers about: orders, returns, products, and our loyalty program. As well as how to view your order status, our size chart, footbed and footwear fitting instructions, our store locator, and a few other things. I think we've done a great job here but if you think something is missing, please feel free to leave a comment below or contact us via Facebook or Twitter.

What's Next?

I'm hoping that you'll agree with me that this is a great upgrade to our current website. However, it's only the beginning. From a design standpoint the only thing that has really changed here is the header. This update was mainly centered around usability, improving our content, and adding/removing some sections. The good news is, our Art Department is working on a totally new design for the website that we hope to launch in the summer. The navigation and structure of the website won't change, but the overall look will. We might even include a few new features to keep you interested.

Thanks for taking the time to read this post. I'd love to hear any feedback you have on the updated website in the comments below, or on Facebook or Twitter.

Posted by: Matt Lambert at 12:52 p.m. in News | Comments (0)