In 2012 I was tasked with creating an expanded concept for the Model Year 2013 refresh for the Raleigh website. It was designed to utilize all of our beautiful lifestyle photography (by MotoFish Images) and make it "a coffee table book for the internet" while also enhancing usability with fewer clicks-counts and adding multiple features.
Sadly, the budget was slashed not long after this first concept stage and the previous site skin had to live another year. This never actually saw the light of day, err, the light of a monitor, I guess, but was a great exercise nonetheless.
The homepage had five rotating images that highlighted any bike our marketing guy, Sally (who happens to be pictured below), wanted on the site. Weather it was coordinating with ads running at the time or pushing new product, the images and the text could be changed on the fly on the site's back-end, making for a versatile marketing tool and adaptable landing page that would never get stale.
The bike pages displayed a huge image of the product, making it easy to see, and all details of the bike (price, color, etc) were easy to find and navigation to the next/previous model was intuitive.
Category pages were based on a simple grid and column layout with one bike preview image, making it extremely easy to find the model the user would be looking for, or to just browse through the bikes without wasting clicks. The background image also changed from category to category to reflect where the rider would encounter the bike: the road, the mountain, etc.
A quick click on different tabs below the bike allowed the user to choose the information they wanted displayed, with the big, beautiful product image never leaving the screen.
And a new tab function was a quick Dealer Locator that allowed the user to find the nearest bike shop they could purchase the bike at, without ever having to leave the page.
Using the same (theoretical) technology as the Dealer Locator, a new feature kept track of our Demo Vans so the consumers could find all of the special events and shop visits they were going to be at and when.
Another proposed addition was the Teams section. This followed our National, International, and high-profile Local teams, with the page still primarily utilizing lifestyle images to make the teams easily identifiable and to keep the user interested.
Fast forward about 18 months later, a new direction was proposed. The team at G-Conspiracy developed what was eventually used. Visit Raleighusa.com to check it out.
All logos, bike names, images are © Raleigh Bicycles.
Most lifestyle images are by the awesome dudes at MotoFish Images.
Studio photography by the one and only Earl Harper Studios.
