theGourmetDepotCo.com
The Gourmet Depot is a subsidiary of Appliance Sales and Services, located in San Francisco. The company has been in business since 1953, and specializes in parts and accessories for small electric appliances. They originally had a web site, but due to circumstances beyond their control the website was lost. I came in to help them recover their presence on the web, which had become a major source of revenue. This task was difficult because they wanted a look and feel similar to what their customers were used to, yet there was confusion about how it had previously functioned. I sat down with them and talked them through how the website could function and we concluded on an architecture that was easy for a customer to navigate and easy for the staff to administrate. Because they were still a small company that was unable to hire a full time web master, they needed a site that could display their vast inventory, while allowing a non-technical person easy access to add, edit and delete items. This can be seen by the simplicity of the site. When a person comes in to the site they aren’t bombarded by a thousand links to different things. Instead they are given simple navigation tools to find the item they desire. The categories aren’t broken up into subcategories where items can seem to get lost and the administrator has to build complex category structure. The site is simple to navigate and administrate. In fact the site is so easy to administrate that the company is free to use the existing staff to administer the site instead of hiring a separate Webmaster. The store includes features like searching, order comments, and an easy checkout that calculates shipping for UPS and US mail. The entire project was completed in a couple of weeks.