Creative Cut: Ross-Simons

Designers and marketers see both limitations and advantages in Web-site creative. The overarching limitation is a lack of control in the appearance of the end product because of differing technologies on consumers’ computers.

On the flip side, Web sites can be altered “on the fly,” making them a more dynamic place for testing and learning about customer preferences.

Deborah Kania is lead marketer at multichannel optical supplier Lens Express in Deerfield Beach, FL, co-author of “The Web Catalog Cookbook” and “The Internet World Guide to One-To-One Web Marketing,” and author of the upcoming book “Branding.com.”

She observes, “Two of the biggest changes to the creative process because of e-commerce are 1) shortened cycle times for design; and 2) marketers have more data to work with, more quickly, in terms of being able to react to successes and failures with efforts online.”

Kania says when Lens Express tests creative in its TV and direct mail channels, it usually takes a month to know what works. Comparatively, Web-site and online-advertising go’s can be separated from no’s in a week.

Off the Screen vs. Off the Page

What are the behavioral differences of consumers who shop online vs. from a catalog?

Glenda Shasho Jones, president and CEO of full-service catalog agency Shasho Jones Direct in New York, points out: “Obviously, a catalog comes to you; a Web site, you go to. So it’s a little different shopping mentality.”

She notes that consumers still see print catalogs as a relaxed shopping medium, because catalogs are portable and flippable. But online shopping means a heavily targeted search by the consumer, which can be a chore. So the challenges for a Web site are rivaling the comparative luxury of a print book and delivering pages as speedily as possible to the customer’s screen. Download speed depends on the user’s Internet connection, but smaller file sizes are always a good idea.

Kania adds, “Every customer’s ‘flow’ on a site is slightly different. This is due to the hyperlinked nature of the Internet. So the challenge for the marketers is to try to direct the flow.”

Eyeball behavior influences design differently in each medium, points out Shasho Jones: “Print catalogs are sequential, whereas on a Web site, there are all kinds of options.”

On the Web, people can choose to look at information in many ways. One advantage Web catalogs have are logical/architectural features, such as site maps, that spare users the tedious task of moving “back and forward” online.

Getting Marketing and Creative on the Same Page

With this explosion of options, e-commerce site designers face a burden and an opportunity in one: interactivity. The interplay of products with links makes the production more architecturally complex than in print catalogs.

Miriam Frawley, president of e-Diner Design and Marketing in Highland Mills, NY, uses this example of a level of pre-planning that doesn’t go on in print: When creating a Web catalog, you can tie a lamp to a lampshade in the copy, with a hypertext link that takes you to a table.

Logic should take precedence over design in the realm of Web creative, Frawley says: “[Unlike with a print book,] it’s not so much about ‘Wow, what a great looking Web site!’ It’s more about ‘Wow, I need that lamp!”

Marketing and creative are often at odds, but with all the things that can go wrong in the fledgling online shopping world, too much is at stake. Frawley refers to marketers’ common complaint that designers design for themselves. Customer confusion and frustration are the result: “Even though it’s getting better, you go on the Internet and see so many pages [obviously] created on a large monitor,” which designers typically use, Frawley laments. The reality is that many people have small monitors: “You never want viewers to have to scroll sideways.”

Kania says an 800x600 DPI (dots per inch) screen is most common for consumers’ screens. “You have to think of ordinary people with ordinary computers; resolution should be viewed in 640 DPI,” advises Frawley.

She also points to the availability of “sniffers,” a technology that detects the browser the customer is using, and optimizes a Web site automatically.

Another Web boon: When you want to see what the back of a lamp looks like, you can do that on the ‘Net. 3D models, such as that used at Landsend.com, are another illustration of the Web’s interactivity.

“If you want the detail of a lamp base … with a print catalog, unless you call out that area in another picture, you don’t have that option. On the Internet, you can show it,” Frawley says.

Form follows function, says Kania. Lens Express is “going for more ‘nested’ or ‘subpage’ navigation,” which means a linear arrangement of sub-menus that adjusts and prioritizes as you click through to new pages. For instance, instead of a honking menu bar accompanying you like a monolith, the challenge is to resize it to keep all the options on screen while foregrounding what the user wants. And to avoid horizontal and vertical scrolling. Of course, the only alternative is more linked pages, so watch those download times.

Bells and Whistles

Shasho Jones recalls that as recently as a year ago, “When we directed people to build Web sites, we were looking for bells and whistles, because we were taking our print catalog experience and saying: OK, in a catalog we want to grab attention (through dot whacks, etc.); and we thought we had to do that on Web sites, as well.”

Having learned that exciting Web pyrotechnics such as video, audio and animation can drive away shoppers whose computers have bandwidth limitations causing the site not to load, catalogers now are making their Web sites simpler.

However, “Rollovers are effective,” says Frawley, referring to the image that appears when a user points her mouse on a certain element. It’s like a “little surprise”—clean and non-intrusive, and similar to scratch-off stickers on print pieces. “People want to see what else they can discover,” she affirms.

Cataloger Ross-Simons of Providence, RI, works under the assumption that bells and whistles should be used sparingly until every end user has them.

Doug Doidge, Internet design director at Ross-Simons, says, “We shoot for things to download at standard modem speed, and we don’t force any plug-in downloads. We aim at using features embedded in standard, mainstream browsers.

“We’d love to use Flash [a movie-type plug-in] and things like that, but until it becomes mainstream, and everyone has it, we won’t,” he pledges.

Photography and Type

Frawley says you have to be “more direct” when creating for the Internet. For instance, “You can’t have a mood shot, really. In print, you can create a beautiful lifestyle shot with multiple products, and sell off the page. To create that on the Internet would require a very big file; that’s why most images on the Web are silhouetted.”

Frawley points out that repurposing for the Web is easier, because a natural process of elimination delimits your choices of what to show at your Web site.

Kania notes, “With the lower resolution, it is hard to hold the details of a product when displayed online. So we try to anticipate this when we are in the studio.

“In fact, we shoot versions of product for print, and different versions for the Web site when we see a potential issue (especially with products that are black!).”

With the differing background requirements for print or Web usage, Shasho Jones says it’s worth the expense to reshoot for Web.

She elaborates, “Web pages need to be cleaner; photos need to forego the backgrounds which a lot of catalog photos have. That means a lot more silhouetted photos, which digital [photography] is good for.”

Screen backgrounds need to be light so print shows up, and photo backgrounds should be blurred or white so they don’t compete with the product.

Shasho Jones suggests that Web designers use more colored type, “even to help consumers navigate, i.e. have an order type color, a shopping type color.” Whereas in catalogs reproducing color is expensive, good registration is hard to achieve and you can’t make last minute changes, on the Web color type is as easy to use as black type, and you can change it in real time.

Typeface is an important brand-consistency element, says Shasho Jones, especially in converting “paper” customers to online customers. Call it the New Yorker effect: everyone recognizes that magazine’s typeface. Some fonts, unfortunately, don’t translate well onto consumers’ browsers. Alas, another challenge for Web creative.

Miriam Frawley notes that AOL—unless users change their preferences—takes any artwork that comes into its system and downsamples it further. “We created one site with a blend, and it looked great on all versions of Netscape, but on AOL it was banding—horrible stripes. We had to change the artwork to get it to look good on AOL.”

For Web layouts, stick to convention

Instead of reinventing the wheel every time, stick with the basic layout features that customers are used to. The dilemma is to distinguish your site subtly, but not confuse consumers: On the Web, you only have seconds to attract customers. Make sure “form follows function.”

Simple. “You can’t just slap your print catalog onto a Web site,” has been the refrain of experts for some time. But Ross-Simons, a multichannel retailer of value-priced jewelry, tableware, crystal, gifts, collectibles and home décor, has done just that to great effect, translating and incorporating non-Internet selling tools into its online strategy. Ross-Simons actually recreated, page by page, its print catalogs on its Web site—because that’s what its customers wanted. (See p. 40).

From a design standpoint, the online catalogs are electronically recreated exactly like the print catalog for consistency. The contents are broken down by product category for easy searching. New catalogs are added as released, roughly eight a year.

Ross-Simons also added a clearance outlet to its site, which has become a very popular feature. Both of these online features came about as a result of customer feedback/surveys.