About The Store

We are a home interior shop in Sussex, England that has just launched a new online store based on Magento.

We have over 2000 fantastic products from wonderful suppliers ranging from Solid Oak, Chic French, Venetian, Oriental, Lighting and Mirrors.

In our shop in Ditching, Sussex we have a small selection of the furniture along with many more home accessories.

The clean simple Mosey Online home page, showcasing a banner widget.

The Store Design

This is the Magento Design Review for Mosey Online Interiors. The site is not the best Magento site I have seen as it lacks a few finishing touches, but it designed and developed inhouse, not an easy feat, but certainly one that will have saved thousands.

I think it showcases the Magento extensions available that can quickly give a site a professional look. The design is a real testament to the quickly growing Magento development community.

There are a few simple little fix ups, for example the favicon is still the default, which in my opinion is a big nono, perhaps Mosey would argue it’s an M for Mosey, not Magento, but I think it’s worth using on of those free favicon generators on the net to fix that up.

About The Creators

Created by one of the Directors (Mark Stocker) the site is a huge upgrade what we had previously was in the end a collaboration of themes, add-ons and widgets purchased and configured from various 3rd parties.

Innovations

The most significant aspect to the development was that it was achieved on a very small budget using the talents of 3rd party software in the form of templates, add-ons and widgets. The end result is a very clean, simple but highly effective website that will hopefully take the business to the next level.

Conclusion

It’s not a 5 star site, but I think it is a good example of what can be achieved quickly and easily with Magento by using the extensions and plugins available to the community.

About The Store

iePlexus (www.ieplexus.com) designed and developed this site within Magento. Motion Boardshop is a kiteboard and longboard shop on Lake Washington in Bothell, WA.

The Store Design

Sometimes you arrive at a site and think wow, everything just gels nicely, the design is tight and cohesive. That’s how I felt when I got to Motion Board Shop. The home page packs a lot of information in by using pictures to immediately show customers what is available in 3 broad categories.

This is the welcome page for the Motion Board Shop, it's clear, crisp and well put together. Immediately presents the product range visually, backing it up with text-on-photo descriptions.

The product imagery is clear and crisp. The category pages take full advantage of Magento layered navigation and the effect is an easy to navigate and browse product catalog.

This shows the clear crisp category page presentation.

The large catalog is handled well by intermediate category selection pages like the Longboard category. The pages are highly polished and feel like mini-homepages. The layered navigation makes it easy for customers to get to what they want from here.

Magento Layered Navigation being used effectively on a parent category called Longboards

So I really like the site, one question I have though, how would it look in IE, without the mozilla rounded border styling?

About The Creators

iePlexus is a company specializing in providing comprehensive marketing strategies for online businesses. Their services consist of the latest Web 2.0 technologies to better increase both the visibility and credibility of your web business in the online market. They specialize in business blogs as well as ecommerce websites using the Magento platform.

Conclusion

The store was suggested for my Magento design showcase and now that I’ve had a chance to I really rate this site and I think the guys at iePlexus have done a brilliant job. 5 stars!

About The Store

Babysleepbags.co.uk is the official UK supplier of award-winning merino baby sleeping bags and Cocooi Babywrap merino baby swaddles from Merino Kids of New Zealand.

Simple clean lines on the store showcase the very stylish product photography.

The Store Design

The store is a clean fixed width layout, simple lines are used to highlight the beauty of the product images. The underlying store has been heavily modified to give a simple, easy to use interface that removes clutter and simplifies the buying process.

Product content copy and product listings blended together

The site employs banner background images with h1/paragraph overlays for a cosmetic page heading effect while retaining full search engine friendliness. The addition of small product display widgets within product description copy gives users an opportunity to drill down to products while reading about the benefits and characteristics. I think this blurring of the lines between product content and product listings is a great step forward for users.

The category pages are heavily customized, giving a clean simplistc look, specials are displayed in a consistent pricing bar with the add to cart button

You’d hardly recognize the category page as being powered by Magento, it has been completely modified to give a very usable, minimalistic interface. The toolbars are removed, the distinctive clutter of the compare and wishlist options are also taken away.

Product pages have been made over drastically too - a powerful gallery widget has been created to showcase the glorious product shots.

The product photography is a real asset to the product range and the product page is a great showcase for it. The product photo widget is reworked from scratch to give a smooth full-sizing effect with gallery capability. The remainder of the page is kept clear and simple, the product descriptions and short descriptions in Magento are employed to give users all they need ‘above the fold’.

The cart page has been streamlined to make buying simple and distraction free.

The last area of the site that I am reviewing is the cart page. It has (like most of the site) been heavily customized. In this case distractions such as the shipping price estimator and the discount code box have been discreetly tucked away. The shipping price is estimated based on your GEO IP, wow! They even allow me to easily select a different zone if I’m sending elsewhere.

Conclusion

Demonstrating extensive usability enhancements, clever backend simplifcations and a minimalist style that showcases the product photography – ticks all the boxes, 5 stars!

About The Store

“Opened by Ted and Beatrice Hill in 1977, Hills Florist has been providing beautiful fresh flowers, innovative designs and quality service for over 30 years.”

The Store Design

The store is designed and built using XHTML and CSS. The clean simplistic lines bring out the vibrant colours in the products themselves, and ensure there are no distractions to the customer.

The crisp clean look of the Hills Florist Home Page. The black background really brings out the vibrant floral colours and patterns shown in the product images.

The important shopping functions of Cart (or Shopping basket as it is called on Hills’ webstore), Account and Search are encapsulated within a top-menu style navigation bar. I like this technique because it keeps these from distracting a user during shopping, but ensures they are ever present when the customer is ready to use them.

This screenshot shows a segment of the Hills Florist category pages. You can see the typically attention grabbing 'Add to Basket' buttons and the highly contrasting product images on the black background.

The use of vertical space here could perhaps be changed to bring more of the second row of products ‘above-the-fold’, an important way of getting more products in front of the user sooner. The add to basket buttons are prominent as they should be and the price is very clearly visible.

The Hills Florist checkout page is very minimalistic. The table borders and divisions are removed which make the page look very clean, but I fear also makes the contents seem to just be floating, without any order.

I think the cart page lets the store down a little bit. The totals are not in clear view and the user has to scroll down to see them (on a lot of common resolutions). The page elements don’t have quite the same put together look as the rest of the site. The remove function is quite prominent on the cart page, which probably isn’t sending the right message to customers. I know this will sound nitpicky, but the default green tick icon in Magento is aliased on a white background, which gives it funny visual artifacts when used on the dark background such as this.

I’ll be voting a 4 stars for this one, I’d be interested to hear what you think?

About The Store

“We are two artists based in Berlin, Germany. A few weeks ago we came up with the idea of a print-on-demand-art-shop that is different from others. We wanted to sell our own artworks and didn’t find any platform – you know we didn’t want to see our work nearby a nice teetyweety-web2.0-glossy-graphics-picture-store.

But we just did not want to be different, our goal is to make strong visual concepts, from cutting edge artists around the globe, affordable.”

This screenshot shows a category page in the store. The dark background for the store was chosen to make the art look it's best.

The Magento Decision

“We both, Michel and myself, worked for many years as art directors and designers. After we read that Varien created an eCommerce solution, because none of the existing solutions met their needs, our decision for Magento was made.”

The home page displays a rotating banner display of featured art. The crisp clean look here sets the style for the rest of the store.

The Design Process

“We thought about a white interface in the first place but refused, because we think that a picture appears best on a black background.

We also wanted an interface which shows our professional approach and is restrained as much as possible to force the expression of the pictures.”

Design Review

The site homepage has a striking appearance, which perfectly compliments the style of artwork being sold. I do wonder how well it will work when there are various other style of art available.

The category pages are clean and simplistic, the careful use of carbon fibre texturing below each image really adds to the generally well put together appearance.

The store is available in two languages and multiple currencies which makes excellent use of Magentos features. The store itself is still under construction. I was fortunate enough to get a sneak peak at it during development, so expect big things to come from this store, the launch is early April.

I’ll be voting 5 stars for this store – it’s very original, and the design really fits with the products being sold How well those two elements continue to match as the artist range is expanded, remains to be seen!