When one of the worlds biggest toy companies approaches you to
redesign their website, it's a huge honour and we're happy to say
we met the challenge with style. The original Bandai home page
attempted to highlight several brands at once but was struggling to
keep up with the diversification of Bandai's market and the
direction they wanted to take their online store. This led to some
brands becoming relegated to a spot further down the page, and not
able to take up as much space.
There were some interesting features in the right hand column
that the client wanted to retain if possible, such as a featured
video are which showed the video of a random brand, a "what's new"
panel that automatcially displayed the latest product to be added
to the site, and a listing of the top five best selling products of
the week.
We decided to change the layout of the homepage from a
three-column layout to a two-column layout in order to maximise the
size of the main content area. This enabled us to create an
interactive hero panel that allows the homepage to show off the top
brands one at a time, while giving each brand an equal weighting.
Other benefits of the enlarged brand area are that bigger product
images can be displayed without the page appearing cluttered.
The features from the right-hand column were then incorporated
into the main content area below the new hero panel. In the process
of relocating these features we also took the opportunity to tidy
them up slightly, modifying their appearance to fit in with the new
homepage design and adding interactivity where possible.
The video box for example has been
converted from a static box that simply shows videos from a random
brand, to an interactive and engaging carousel that allows videos
from all brands to be displayed without taking up any more space
than it did originally.
This makes the feature much more fun and engaging, making the
feature and site much more fun to use and much more appealing for
younger visitors to the site.
Within the time allocated for the redesign we also managed to
streamline a lot of the underlying code for the page, delivering an
improved site at lower bandwidth costs for Bandai, and improved
page loading times for visitors.
Bandai were keen to highlight their social media
profile, so we also made space on the home page for a 'Tweet feed'
that automatically pulls in and displays the latest update from
their Twitter account.