Friday, February 6, 2009

Website Upgrades

So, Amber has been extremely busy over the last week and unfortunately unable to find time to do a blog posting. (No this is not her writing in the 3rd person !). As the COO of RuffleButts, father to Aubrey, and husband to Amber, I'm in charge of a lot of the back-office items that no one likes to talk about (let alone do), but still need to get done. Accounting, web design, marketing creation, technology management, and a lot of other not-so-glamorous activities are just a few of the items on the list. In order to help her out a little bit I'll give you a little taste of what's been going on behind the technological scenes here at RuffleButts.

We're always trying to make our brand and site more fun and easier to explore, so we've gone thru a series of website upgrades over the last few weeks. You've probably noticed some of the changes, and I can assure you, there are many more to come. Here's just a few of the 'tweaks' we've made:

1) Homepage layout redesign. We weren't 100% happy with how our homepage looked, so we spent some time redesigning it. There was just too much text on the old page, and not enough focus on what the focus should be on, our fun & frilly products. A few scrolling and fading images help to get across more design ideas, while taking up less real estate (HINT: you can hover over the moving images to pause them, or click on them for more details). A contrasting Shop Now section will make it easy to get straight to what you're looking for without having to click all over the place to find it and smaller / less text oriented testimonial and RuffleBuzz sections help to get the same points across quicker and easier.

2) Dropdown menus will now appear when you hover over our main/middle navigation bar. This provides much quicker and easier access to our products and make is simpler to see what pieces can mix and match with other items on the site.
3) We added a 'hidden' newsletter sign-up 'tab' on every page. Anyone not on our mailing list already is missing out on some tremendously great deals that we email out periodically (Did you get the Free Fuchsia High Maintenance T-Shirt offer?!?), so we've made it easier to sign up quickly. Simply click the NEWSLETTER SIGNUP white on pink tab at the top of any screen and watch as the sign-up boxes magically appears!
4) There are a ton of other minor tweaks from a more friendly and eye-pleasing ADD TO CART section on each product page, updated image borders, creating state boxes for our retailers section, enhancing our contact us email section, to improving our entire back-end wholesale section in order to make it easier for stores near you to order and carry our products.

We hope the above modifications only serve to improve and enhance both our brand and your time spent on the RuffleButts website. If you ever have any suggestions as to what could be done to make your experience at RuffleButts.com better, we're always open to hearing them!

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