One of the websites that my group spent a lot of time looking at was that walkover.com, a site that sold vintage shoes that began as a family of shoemakers in 1758. In the beginning stages of our project we stumbled upon this site searching for vintage shoes and realized that we liked many things about it, eventually pulling a few ideas and techniques from the site.
The sites use of color is extremely simple, in fact there is very little color at all – and I think that is what the company was going for. There is more of an emphasis on the actual shoes that are being sold than the color scheme presented on the page. There is a lot of white, with touches of light browns and grays, as well as orange, which stands out tremendously against the other colors. Their photographs of the shoes are mostly always presented against white. To me, the simple design and color scheme is a reflection of their business and company culture – a great emphasis put on the quality of their shoes. The texture used on the site is very simple as well. The only texture that seems to be present is that of wood. Throughout the site I encountered two different types of wood paneling that appeared, one light and one dark. I think that this texture seemed to give the site a type of rustic and old appearance, while still maintaining a plain and clean page. I found the use of one very small gradient, but for the most part the wood backgrounds that were used was the only sense of texture.
The straight-forwardness of the site was shown in its navigation techniques as well. These too were very simple and easy to understand. There was a navigation bar at the top, and a useful footer at the bottom with links to other information. Drop down menus were used in the main navigation bar that sequentially opened more detailed destinations that could be clicked upon. I thought this was very useful, especially for a shoe site, where there are a plethora of different shoes to choose from. Instead of just clicking on boots, the menu extended and gave more specific kinds of boots (i.e. winter boots, leather boots). The logo was used as the home button, which is becoming a more popular tactic, but some people are not aware that you can click on a logo to return to the Home page. It is not an obvious button and I think that an actual “Home” button on the navigation bar is important. Your site should be easy to navigate and you don’t want users to have to use the tedious back button on their browser to get back to where they first began. However, I do think that the site does guide the user through the content nicely. A good amount of information is presented on the home page, enough so that it isn’t overwhelming. All of the tags are very detailed and easy to understand. An improvement to the site might be to add a feature that shows similar shoes, or “shoes you might like” when a specific shoe is clicked on. This might catch people’s eye and take them to a product that they otherwise may not have found. Overall, the site was well composed and detail-oriented.
Like mentioned above, my group took a few ideas from this site, but I do believe that our site stands out more than walkover.com. Ethel’s Lace Ups is a site only for women and it is obvious when you view the homepage. When I looked at the homepage of walkover.com, I thought the site consisted only of men’s shoes, but they had a women’s collection as well. I think it should be very obvious what a site sells by what is on the homepage. I think the overall feel of our site is more welcoming than Walkover’s and has a warmer color scheme. I think our site displays a more vintage feel. The minimalism of Walkover’s site reminded me of the more modern style. Overall, I think Ethel’s Lace Ups site is more original and provides a more vintage approach to the web than walkover.com.