Website Design Classics - Harrods
Too often in life, that which is made out to be great disappoints. When you go on holiday you find the reality smaller, dirtier, less impressive than what you imagine. Sometimes, it is the opposite. What you see fills you with wonder and gives you that child like feeling of amazement.
As shopping experiences go, few can compare with Harrods of London. Some make complain that there may be too many tourists but such are the views of the miserable. If you build something great, the people will come. The Food Hall in Harrods is magnificent, in it’s scale, decoration and produce. You could get lost for days in the multiple specialist stores contained with the Harrods building immersing yourself in all the greatest things that one can buy. Where else can you buy a saddle, a set of Louis Vuitton trunks, a Warhol and £2,000 wedding cake in the same store? Even if you cannot buy you are still allowed to look around. Harrods really is food of dreams.
So how do you back up what you do online, with the magnificence of what you do offline. Most online stores don’t have this problem. Amazon for example, run their operation from multiple warehouses. They don’t have to worry about product presentation, or tourists or central London foot traffic. They just need a nice website.
Harrods seem to have approached this website with an evaluation of their core principles:
Quality and Customer Service. This website is undoubtedly high quality - the graphics are crisp and appropriate. The proportionality and spacing of the various elements is excellent while the navigation is intuitive and functional.
The beautiful navigation at the top is some clever CSS and the website has a clear accessibility statement with a policy to back it up. Those who have visited the real store would be familiar with how helpful staff are, especially to those who are in wheelchairs so it is good to see that their principles have carried through online.
I elected to show a screenshot of the online store rather, than just the homepage. While the homepage is very good, I wanted to highlight the presentation versus that of Amazon.com. I think the Harrods website is a great example of unifying online and offline and avoiding that chestnut of embarassing yourself by what you do on the web.
Amazon can never fire my imagination the way Harrods can and it is interesting to see the old world stager can show the Modern Giant how to create a stately online presence.
Posted 26.10.07
December 17th, 2007 at 10:13 pm
[…] printed article. As I have stated before, integrating off line and online is the name of the game. Harrods do an excellent with their website, so I was glad to see yesterday that Car Magazine have spruced […]