Oxford Garden
The Project
DBS>Interactive Creates an English Garden Inspired Website for Oxford Garden.
The Opportunity
Since 1997, Oxford Garden has specialized in designing affordable, commercial-grade outdoor wood furniture for homeowners, municipalities, golf courses, and restaurants. Oxford Garden’s unique approach to furniture design is rooted in creating designs that embody the timeless, classic style representative of English Gardens of the early 18th century.
Oxford Garden has had success marketing their products online, but prior to 2007, their website they was lacking the same passion for timeless design that made their furniture so unique. Oxford Garden turned to DBS>Interactive and charged them with the task of creating a website that would stand the test of time.
The Solution
English gardens of the 18th century are easily identified, due to their artful balance of architecture and design. Drawing inspiration from this, DBS began the website design process in much the same way, focusing on developing a sound site architecture and elegant design that would be worthy of bearing Oxford Garden’s name. After researching the history and origin of Oxford Garden, DBS developed a site mock-up that mirrored Oxford Garden’s classic values.
With 18 different collections and close to 100 products, the site navigation was organized in a manner that was considered to be most intuitive for Oxford Garden’s customers. Special emphasis was placed on accentuating primary design elements, utilizing beautiful typography and vibrant imagery to offset the clinical feel of a white background. Serif font families, more specifically Georgia and Times New Roman, were chosen and implemented into the design because of their classic nature and timeless design.
In conjunction to the design process, unique content was written to populate all product pages, collection pages, and other pages defined in the site architecture. DBS>Interactive then finished the process with Search Engine Optimization, verifying that all content, keywords, and titles were optimized to result in the highest rank among the search engines.
The Impact
With the redesign of Oxford Garden’s site in 2007, we have seen some impressive growth of metrics related to an improved site design. When comparing the 4th quarter of 2007 to the 4th quarter of 2009, we see nearly a 20% increase in time on site, resulting in an average of an additional 23 seconds on site. 23 seconds may not seem like much time, but in this crazy world we call the Internet, seconds are more comparable to hours.
The length of time is somewhat debated, but studies have shown that you have as little as 3-5 seconds for a page to load before users bounce upwards of 90% of the time. The key take-away is you only have seconds to make a first impression. Any additional amount of time after the initial impression can be used to engage the customer, furthering their progress down the conversion funnel. Another metric that indicates a more lasting design is Pages per Visit (PPV). In the same date range as before, we see nearly a 30% increase in Pages per Visit. PPV is a great metric for measuring user engagement. The greater number of pages your users view, the more likely it is that they will remember you and return to your site for their future needs.
Design elements like the beautiful typography and clean photography featured by Oxford Garden are often overlooked, supplanted from the lime light by more concrete factors such as fresh content and unique functionality. While these factors are certainly very important to a website’s success, it is nice to see that a careful consideration of typography and imagery can result in just as impressive gains.
