Emu Bikes is a new electric bicycle company that has chosen to forego the usual route to market of selling its bikes to bike shops, and instead sell entirely online. Our friends at Antidote had developed the brand along with owner Jonathan Rose, and asked us to translate the new brand for the web.
Because we wanted to create a site as unique as the Emu bikes, we chose to use WordPress as the content management framework for our e-commerce website design because it offers extensive design flexibility. E-commerce functionality is provided by the excellent WooCommerce plugin, and we also created a bespoke integration with credit facility Hitachi Pay-by-Finance.
The homepage uses a modular arrangement that incorporates bold blocks of colour alongside images of the bikes and dynamically updated blocks featuring blog posts. The content of the blocks can be modified to feature different sections of the site, or even single products. Responsive design principles mean that the blocks rearrange according to the device the site is viewed on.
To support our e-commerce website design, buried within the code are microformats and schema information to allow search engines, RSS readers and affiliate marketing engines to easily identify product information. Amongst the design flourishes is the use of animated gifs and also parallax effect hero images — we had at our disposal some wonderful illustrations designed for the brand and by using parallax, when the user scrolls, it gives the impression that the cyclists in the illustrations are moving through the landscape.
Behind the scenes we’ve used integrations with MailChimp to capture information about customers that can be used to offer tailored after-purchase messaging — a goal was to provide tools that allow the brand to offer an exemplary after-sales customer experience. We have also used popups to promote offers and encourage visitors to signup to the mailing list. Finally, we mapped out a basic content strategy utilising the blog and email which will improve search performance over time whilst communicating the advantages of the Emu e-bike.
