It was important to keep the scope of this e-commerce facelift to a reasonable breadth and depth. Although it would have been easy to bite off more than we could chew with a holistic brand paradigm shift, we focused on actionable goals within the e-commerce sphere (listed above).
One of the main points of emphasis that drove the design of the website was brand awareness. Because The Missing Link was in the process of re-tailoring their company to appeal to a millennial crowd, it was important to take into account those newer users who have never used or even heard of The Missing Link.
The team put a focus on generating SEO-optimized content that educated users on The Missing Link’s products, how they’re made, and putting the customer's pet’s health at the forefront. We found that the best way to present that content was through a simplified and direct user interface and experience. A responsive full-width layout and complementary use of vibrant and neutral colors is what allows users to be able to effectively navigate the website.
The content that the team produced to live on the site educates the users about the topic and serves as an added design aesthetic for the site. All of the content was styled and placed deliberately keeping in mind the brand’s identity, their offering, and the millennial audience they aim to reach.
As with all e-commerce platforms, you want users to convert – specifically,
you want users to buy. The challenge for us was to create a comprehensive balance with the number of regular, e-commerce product pages and non-product pages that are meant for content creation and re-iteration, SEO rankings, and educating the user all at the same time. Our approach to this was to utilize internal links from those pages to various relevant, strategically-placed aspects of the site.
We worked with The Missing Link’s team to create a fully-responsive e-commerce solution to help support their marketing efforts — one that properly represented The Missing Link not only as a brand, but also as an experience, and as a lifestyle. Its pages and the web copy that lives on them are ever-building in SEO value, which drives up visibility and thereby users to the website.