The BBC is a client that needs no introduction, a brand that has a vast global reach and many millions of customers and I am honoured to have worked on this site design. The first time I designed the BBC Shop ecommerce store was in 2007. Web design was was all about subtle gradients and rounded corners, the iPhone had only just been released so designing for touch wasn’t an issue, responsive design hadn’t been invented and David Tenant was playing Dr Who. Back then the site looked like this.
Fast forward to 2013 following many incremental redesigns, new mobile sites etc. BBC wanted their eCommerce store to go responsive to align with other aspects of their online presence. The redesign ultimately contributed to the BBCShop.com eCommerce business growing by 30.4% in the year 2013 – 2014. Having established a good working process for designing and building responsive websites the headers and footers were approved first and built allowing the design process to move quickly into the browser.
From here I was able to work directly on the page layouts and styling directly in the templates and (sass) stylesheets. This meant that as the design was finalised it was already built and didn’t need to be reinterpreted by a dev team. As the statistics were showing a major increase in customers using tablet computers special attention was paid to ensuring the store was optimised these users.
