4 replies to this topic

[George Dyke]

Good Morning All,

We've got a new online catalog, and would love some feedback:

http://www.crystalse...m/2010_catalog/ (for larger monitors)

http://www.crystalse..._catalog_small/ (for smaller monitors)

Have a great weekend!

Cheers,

George

[royster13]

Will you have a regular website with out all that page turning stuff?....When I go to a website i do not want to use a catalogue like that.....

[George Dyke]

Hi Royce,

We have a new website coming out shortly and NO, it will not have any of page turning like you see with our catalog. I agree with you that page turning gimmickry is cute for a catalog, but it not something you want as a navigation interface on a website.

You can get to our catalog easily enough from our new website if you need to, but we feel that the catalog should be something you can refer people to, (or send to them), without having to get into our website interface at all. Not that there is anything wrong with going to our website. Pricing is not available unless you log in as a distributor. And we make the point of informing people that our products must be purchased through our distributors.

Anyway, I just wanted to say that I understand your concern and the short answer to your question is that we are keeping our catlaog and the website mutually exclusive in how they interact.

Cheers,

George

Edited by George Dyke, 12 October 2009 - 05:38 PM.

[ScottH]

I don't mind flipping websites, as long as they're fast. Some are sooooo slow. The Sears / Craftsman one comes to mind. It's painful how slow it is.

Take a look at Premium Wear's closeout catalog. If you're going to use a page turner, that's the way to do it. I can scan that as fast as (if not faster) than I can a paper catalog.

http://premiumwearfa...cation/?i=22676

[George Dyke]

I checked out Premium Wear's catalog. I looked at it in Firefox, Safari and Internet Explorer. You can turn a page fast, but the graphical interface is more like a "hard fold" rather then a smooth page peel. It works, but the user interface is not as elegant. Speed on the page turn was the same for me on our catalog vs theirs. I think our Crystal Sensations catalog has a more "natural" interface feel.

I also found three things in Premium Wear's catalog that were rather frustrating, and all of them are, I think, attributable to catalog software that was chosen:

1) If you double click (as I did because the catalog did not seem responsive), you get an annoying zoom prompt window which keeps appearing.

2) The scroll bar in zoom mode had a few ballistics issues. And a black background to the bar felt odd and incomplete if you are used to an "industry standard" scroll interface.

3) Page selection arrows are on top making it necessary to travel across the screen when trying to turn the page with a mouse, rather than just going to lower left corner which would be more convenient.

That, and the graphical clutter on top, takes away from the content, in my opinion.