Posted by: How many businesses have read in awe the statistics of www.johnlewis.co.uk according to John Lewis themselves, the renowned online shopping site takes more dosh than all of their high street stores and as much as their London Oxford Street branch – a massive achievement for which they are due great respect, but could you replicate such performance?
Would you accept a conditional “possibly” as an answer? Ok, so perhaps we’re ducking the question, but the point is that many companies look at the design of the JL website and say “oh, we want to copy the JL design” or “we want to copy the JL navigation and layout” .
What these people miss completely and entirely is that John Lewis enjoy a well earned national nay, perhaps international reputation and brand recognition. They advertise on the TV and have wholly embraced the concept of promotion on as well as off line and link their business offer to both with enviable panache. The idea of ordering online and collecting from a local store was pretty nearly a first for them.
More importantly, the requirement for careful search engine optimisation of such a brand is to put it lightly… not that important, which enables JL to focus their usability on the sound assumption that a high proportion of their users already know the brand and know what to expect from it. The only challenge (and lets face it, from this point that’s difficult) is to lead their loyal customers to what they are looking for by good navigation and shove a few special offers in front of them at the right point – we love www.johnlewis.co.uk but lets face it, unless you just happen to be John Lewis, you need to embrace a different approach to designing your website,… most people won’t have heard of you and ask yourself can your mantra be ” Never Knowingly Undersold “