Western Lifestyle ECommerce Site

TheJewelryLadyRedRiver.com

I am a website developer & internet marketer developing this site for the client. I am hoping I can get a more exciting design by tapping the collective creativity here than I've been getting from using in-house designers. This is my first 99designs experience & I'm filled with excited anticipation!

I'll say more about the target audience & the site requirements below, but the client is in her 40s, has kids who compete in rodeo, and owns a physical store that sells southwestern jewelry, western jackets, purses, hats & boots, other clothing & home accessories with western flare.

I want to thank you in advance for your time & your creativity!

The target audience is primarily women. Younger women, maybe 25-40, purchase the lower end jewelry, while older women, roughly 40-70, purchase the higher end, one of a kind jewelry and other more expensive items in the store.

This genre of store is called "Western Lifestyle", and probably most of its followers live in the western US, including the southwest. Many may have horses or ranches, and attend rodeos or similar activities. The main target audience is really wealthy, retired women (and their gift-buying husbands).

This is a Magento Commerce website, and needs to incorporate specific elements for that (see details below).

My overall summary for the design is "clean, and looks like an ecommerce site, with gently western & a bit feminine overtones." The client has said "classy western, simple" and also suggested "Turquoise and leather with western scrolls (keep simple)". I don't want to go overboard with such design elements, if you know what I mean. I'm attaching an image of a texas star that I verified with the client is an acceptable example of more modern western scroll, rather than the traditional, older style.

The logo is attached as a jpeg. I couldn't get the original file from the client. The tagline is "Life is too short to wear boring jewelry!"

The client has suggested the use of a western font on the site, but I say that is too much western.

Desired actions on the site are (probably in this order) to buy stuff, sign up for the newsletter, add stuff to your wishlist, or at least bookmark the site.

We generally include images of smiling faces & happy people as they tend to make people comfortable with a site & increase conversions.

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As mentioned above, the site will be a Magento ecommerce site. As such there are specific things we need. We have developed a best practices formula for Magento templates, and this is a good example of it, which I will refer to for the rest of this page details section: http://www.mybabybeddingshop.com/.

HEADER:
- logo (you may rearrange the text vs the logo icon)
- tagline ("Life is too short to wear boring jewelry!")
- phone number (575 754 3028) with invitation to call
- small set of credit icons (visa, mc, amex, discover)
- text to the effect of "Order online 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, 365 days a year!"

TOP (HORIZONTAL) MENU BAR
Links for:
- Home
- About Us
- FAQs
- Contact Us
- Returns & Exchanges
- then a space, then
- My Wishlist
- My Account
- Shopping Cart
and the search box

MAIN MENU - LEFT COLUMN
I'm attaching a word document with the menu hierarchy. We want the top 2 levels of the menu exposed like they are in the example site. The "live support" in the example site is not necessary.

RIGHT COLUMN (see example site)
- mini cart
- "easy ordering" box
- "free shipping for orders over $100" box
- 100% satisfaction guaranteed graphic
- newsletter signup ("Sign up for our newsletter to receive exclusive discounts and notifications of new inventory")
- testimonial box
- No community poll

I have run out of characters so am attaching pagedetails.txt to complete.

The current website is http://thejewelryladyredriver.com/. The current site is badly organized, not ecommerce-friendly, and the design is over-the-top western & hokey to my eye. I hate the "old west" font and the wood grain background for some elements. It's unsophisticated, cheesy.

Gunslinger of Bandera (http://gunslingerofbandera.com - the html version): I love a lot of this website design but it's definitely over the top busy, and their design falls apart when you get to the cart. I love the textures, colors, dimensionality. I love the feminine-western end result. It's too busy, I think, for a real ecommerce site, which you can tell when you click into the "store" part of the site & it just looks terrible.

Crow's Nest (http://www.crowsnesttrading.com) is a very successful competitor in the western lifestyle space. I think this site design is too plain & I hate that pink-ish color that they use, but the feminine font in their logo is worth noting, and the plainness does not compete with the products.

Pinto Ranch (http://pintoranch.com/) is the most "traditional ecommerce" design, with some western overtones, and is probably closest to what we'll do. There's nothing overtly western about it, but you still get the western feel somehow.