While creating our shoe site, our concept of a socially conscious company that gives back to the community made us immediately think of Toms shoes. Toms.com uses the color blue as an accent throughout the website, with a clean white background. This helps the pictures to come to the forefront. Their pictures, especially their image scroller on their homepage, help show the story of giving that Toms is trying to convey. On their products pages, all of the images of their products are on a white background, which help the products pop from the page, drawing your eye to them and minimizing distractions while browsing.

Toms is all about giving back and social consciousness, and they highlight this focus by placing their “One to One” giving program on the main menu bar, as well as a link for stories and videos of people they have helped. They could have placed this information lower on the page, or in a submenu, but by placing it right alongside the shoes they are selling, they let a visitor coming to their site know that this is a primary focus of the company. They also highlight other socially conscious companies and products through a marketplace tab on the main menu that is a tannish color, which helps it stand out on the menu bar.
Overall the website is very easy to navigate. Links are easily recognizable and intuitive. The top menu stays in place throughout the site with their logo branding the page to remind you you are still in their website. Each subpage has either a picture or text that tells you were in the site you are. At the bottom in the footer are all the main link for their pages, with their social media icons colored a blue to tie them into the site nicely.

We attempted to take some of Toms website designs and incorporate them into our shoe site. We placed a link in the navigation to highlight that we were focused on giving as well as selling shoes. Keeping our logo prominent throughout the site was also important, though we should have enlarged it some. We also tried to have a simple, elegant design to highlight our products, photos, and our mission. To improve our site, placing all of our products on a simplified background, or a background color to match our site would help the shoes not get lost in the page amongst other shoes and products. Overall I think the spirit of our site matches Toms, but needs improvements before it could be taken seriously.