The challenge

Second album syndrome is a fear for all bands. The challenge is a perennial one, how do you follow up your previous work, especially when the original was well received?

There have been many examples of bands which have fallen foul of the curse, The Stone Roses and The Killers failed to live up to the promise of their initial work. However, some bands have created their best work second time around: Nirvana (Nevermind) and Radiohead (The Bends) spring to mind.

Our challenge, having created Gloster’s much-loved and much-copied original album website, was to move their online presence forward whilst retaining the magic of the original. What we had to avoid at all costs was what is known in the industry as "a Terence Trent D'Arby".

Our approach

The original site looked beautiful, as long as you were not looking at it using an iPhone or iPad. The flash platform was great for pure aesthetic, but the task for this revision was to go beyond skin-deep.

Gloster's original site had been copied by a competitor and we wanted to ensure that this couldn’t happen again. We needed to retain Gloster’s "design leading" market position, but also introduce other facets that make up the Gloster brand.

The new website goes beyond the aesthetic and considers everything from the materials used in construction, the designer's story and the resellers and specifiers who are involved in a customer's journey. In doing so, we knew that what we created couldn’t be copied by others, because no other competitor has the richness of supply chain as Gloster.

Using Drupal we created a faceted site that allows viewers to find the right collection for their needs using the criteria that makes best sense to them.

The results

The new Gloster site boasts almost a thousand products across a number of languages to deliver a site which helps the customers of Gloster, the specifiers of Gloster and the resellers of Gloster to find the products which meet their needs best.

The challenge

Gloster, a company specialising in high-end outdoor furniture, tasked us to design an online experience that reflected the luxury of their brand. We had to design a user-friendly website for an international audience that allows users to view the product range, search for retailers and download a brochure - and all this in five different languages.

Our approach

We designed and built a Flash-based website that has the style and impact not usually possible from HTML. To aid SEO and enhance accessibility the website is powered using an XML-based content management system, which allows every piece of content to have its own URL, meaning search engines are able to index the pages.

The results

Since its launch Gloster has seen an enormous increase in their web traffic and brochure downloads. The visually stunning website not only echoes Gloster's attention to detail, innovative nature and contemporary style, it also provides them with useful analytical information about their customers and their interactions with the site.