Brandi Calhoun

www.shopruche.com

For the final monthly review, I chose an online store called Ruche. My group actually found this website at the beginning of our project and was going to use it as a vintage-feel inspiration, but came up with other ideas. Though this website offers other products besides shoes, it has a very vintage feel to it, which was one of the ultimate goals of our final project.

Ruche uses a very pastel, pale color scheme throughout the site. The majority of the background is white, but with hints of some peach and turquoise to make it pop. The “Ruche” logo is a vintage-y script font with some pale leaves in those colors behind it. This scheme makes the website simple, yet attractive.

There isn’t much texture to the website, except for the leaves here and there. Overall, it is a pretty “flat” website; no shadows really, or dimension to any specific parts. Also, the navigation is pretty simple. The main navigation bar gives you multiple options, like new arrivals, clothing, shoes, and accessories. Under each category are also sub-categories to help the consumer find exactly what they want. It is easy to get to the shopping cart, located in the upper right hand corner. It even offers a rollover of the shopping cart, so that you can glance at what you have put in there so far.

One thing I noticed right away about their website that we fixed on ours was the inconsistent background for all of the shoe images. They range from a neutral tan-gray to white. We made sure that the white background in all of our shoe images remained the same through the photoshopping. Also, our website could be a little bit more organized when it comes to types of shoes, or colors of shoes, since it is primarily women’s vintage shoes. Some of the font on both websites is a little bit small, which may not be a huge problem, but may help older customers a little. Overall, I think our website turned out to have a very vintage-feel to it and looks very clean and easy to navigate. We could have some extra options, like Ruche has, including a blog, a search bar, a sort button for the shoes, sub-categories, new arrivals, etc. Our website does, however, have a little bit more texture to it and has more dimension; shadows, outlines, etc. But for now, I think our website stands out for the most part. It is different, clean, attractive, and easy to navigate.