Following Blend’s initial discussions with Due West, we understood that they had promotions just about everywhere on their site, and we opted to use the Flex Theme by Out of the Sandbox to support these Mega Menus. They wanted in-depth Mega Menus with no simple drop-down menus. There were also plenty of columns, collections, images and promotions and this was something that the Flex Theme does well. We felt that this would mean that shoppers would have a much easier way of finding the products that they wanted, but were not necessarily aware of.
One of the challenges with this project was that our client wanted the ability to toggle through product images on the collection page as well as an add-to-cart button added to each product image. The logic here was that customers who shop online also shopped in-store, and together, Blend and Due West decided that this would give some of the same experience online, as it does in-store. This needed to be done in such a way that site speed wouldn’t be affected, so we created a dynamic, custom solution to make this a reality.
Given the number of brands and products, we also improved the filtering on the Due West site using an app called Filter Tools, so that filters are categorised into groups, for example, colour, product type or brand. They are dynamically shown or hidden appropriately for each collection, so we can be sure that we’re providing the customer with clear signposting to the products they’re looking for.
