Jasper Conran
Introducing Jasper Conran
With a career spanning over 20 years, Jasper Conran is one of the UK’s most renowned designers. As well as creating seasonal couture collections and lines for Debenhams, Jasper Conran also has bridal, crystal, china, fragrance, luggage and fireplace collections.
We helped quintessential English designer Jasper Conran showcases stunning Web Design, with Digital strategic support, Hosting and a streamlined Content Managed delivery.
The challenge
Our brief was to create an elegant and stylish website for Jasper Conran that used statement imagery to capture the brand’s essence online including its clean lines, quintessential Britishness, contemporary style, wit and craftsmanship. Jasper Conran also wanted to bring his Sackville Street flagship store to the fore and raise the profile of his less well known work as a theatre and costume designer.
The site had to appeal to a variety of audiences; from fashion students, press and couture lovers to potential partners interested in working with Jasper Conran. On a practical front, the site needed to be search engine friendly and easier to navigate, without compromising the design experience.
What we did
We began by creating a user-friendly information architecture, working with the client to balance their business needs with those of site users. This intelligence was translated into sitemaps, user journeys and wireframes to ensure that the design team had everything they need to create a powerful experience online. The resulting look and feel takes its inspiration from Jasper Conran’s signature monochrome design motif, with its simple and elegant lines.
Sophisticated landing pages for Collections lead the user into the Jasper Conran portfolio via a seamless Flash journey. For this, our development team explored new areas of Flash development and experimented with history management to create a navigable and accessible Flash site. We developed a way to map user journeys by URL, enabling users to navigate to previously viewed content using their browser’s back button; this is impossible with conventional Flash usage.
In terms of content management, the site’s Flash modules have been incorporated into our CMS OTHERobjects, where they can be edited in situ rather than in the flash file. Flash user journeys are typically hard to optimise for search engines, but as the Flash is editable in OTHERobjects, targeted META data can be created for each Flash element to assist SEO.
The result
Whilst maintaining very high design standards, we have also created a site that is focused on achieving challenging business goals. Through our Digital Strategy Programme we continue to work hard with the Jasper Conran team to consistently deliver on these business goals.