Some Luna friends, Horsham Colour – or I should say now HC Pro – are one of the largest professional photographic labs in Australia, situated in the charming country town of Horsham in the middle of the wheat belt of western Victoria. Their business is as a high volume, but still very high quality, photographic and print production house.
As a generation of wedding and portrait photographers grow old and retire, a new generation of photographers and products have grown in their place. Customers no longer just want prints in frames, but albums, cards, books, canvas and prints bonded onto metal etc. Enabling photographers to understand and order such a wide range of products online has been a goal for the lab for some time.
hcpro.com – a new website which describes the lab, their products and the online ordering process – has just gone online with a bunch of hard work from the guys in Horsham, Grant Bisset at www.speakinteractive.com and ourselves at Luna Tractor.
We extol to teams the virtue of actually using their own products and processes… to eat their own dog food. With this web project we took exactly the same approach we would recommend to others, ourselves.
We started with a brain storming and culling exercise to decide what the minimal viable product was – which messages we had to communicate to give us focus. Working through three areas:
- Brand – What people remember.
- Content – What people learn.
- Action – What people do.
With each of those three areas defined as 2 or 3 easy to understand anchors we went away and designed a simple site. From there we made basic, hand drawn wireframes.
Next we drew up a rough content plan based on the wireframes and started to flesh it out by doing the product photography and copy writing. Over about a week we continually updated our content ‘board’ until we were happy with how it was sitting.
Ready now for construction, Grant did some work on the build in short cycles with Michael (from HC Pro) and I engaged in a review and then tasks to create missing pieces of content. Having the whole website as a visual picture on the wall made it easier to choose images that conveyed the story we needed to tell, quality and careful made products. It also showed us what was missing, and we could put in place holders which served as our to do list, and a kind of burn down chart. Building a very small site (which is really only a version 1.0) made it easier to get quick feedback from potential customers. From here we’ll listen to what real life customers say, how they use the site from the stats, and phone them to ask why.
The end result is a surprisingly small and simple site, just what we were aiming for. It never ceased to surprise me how often our solution to problems was simply to remove content, text or extra ‘fluff’ which we had designed in but wasn’t answering one of our core Brand, Content or Action goals. Check out the site and let us know what you think.
Before:
After:
Recent Comments