Some people buy flowers online, last weekend I received flowers from an awesome online site. As this doesn’t happen very often, my housemate that opened the door immediately took them to my other housemate, thinking they were from her lovely boyfriend. My housemate opened the card and had a very confused look on her face when it said ‘enjoy your blokey orchid’. I then got excited because the flowers were actually for me and living proof that a new site we had been building at work was alive and working.
The brief for this site was different to any other that I had previously worked on. As you are probably aware, when going to send someone flowers there is such a huge range of websites online to choose from. So the discussion began on how this site we were creating would be any different. Why would our site be chosen over the major companies that already have an established brand and client base? The core of most flower sites (I want to say all, but I can’t really back that up) is a picture of the flowers and a lovely description. A description that is sooo lovely that it can make you sick. So the decision was made to create a site that was entertaining. Make buying flowers fun. The main way to do this was through the content in the site. But it was not just restricted to the content. The character was put into the site in the design phase. Emphasis was placed on attention to detail. The footer, the titles and even the buttons were to be made entertaining.
The site still has all the functionality and information that all the other flower sites have, it just has so much more. I strongly suggest having a read of some of the content for yourself. A personal favourite is the Nose Gay. You don’t even need to want to buy flowers, if you want a laugh, then just go read a few of the descriptions and be entertained.
Another element to the site that was to be entertaining was the shopping cart. Go take a look and see how many flowers you can add before the little grey dude chucks a hissy fit!
This project was a lot of fun to work on and as there was not a tight deadline, it was nice to be able to spend time on the little things. Working on the site also meant completely switching my mindset into crazy mode. It took lots of sugar and coffee, but I believe the end result is worth it.
Let me know if you think it works by checking it out and leaving a comment on this blog or on our showcase site
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