Archive for May, 2011

New Pour La Victoire eCommerce Site

Monday, May 23rd, 2011

First Scribe is proud to announce the launch of the new ecommerce website for Pour La Victoire shoes - one of the hottest brands in the fashion industry!  The new website is the latest in desktop and mobile design & development.

About Pour La Victoire:

Fashion industry veterans Jay Adoni and David Giordano founded Plv Studio Inc. in the Spring of 2008. Mr. Adoni, the owner of the majorly successful footwear brand LJ Simone partnered with Mr. Giordano who brought his RTW and Accessories market experience to the table.  The Pour La Victoire brand was highly successful in the brick and mortar stores including Neiman Marcus, Nordstrom, and Saks Fifth Avenue but 2011 was chosen as the year to make a splash with www.PourLaVictoire.com.

The Project:

In 2010, Eric Sabo brought together a collaborative group to create a site to propel Pour La Victoire to the head of the line for high-fashion shoe brands in NYC.  Eric Sabo is an ecommerce operations consultant hailing from New York City.  Sabo has years of ecommerce experience with brands such as Tommy Hilfiger and Theory.  His industry connections brought the NYC design team and our Minneapolis development team together to create a website worthy of the high-fashion product line.

Design:

The design team at Lyle Swift worked directly with Sabo on behalf of Adoni and Giordano at Pour La Victoire to design a website that truly articulates the high-style nature of the product line.  Clean, muted lines allow the product photography to jump up and take center stage. Extra care was taken to highlight clear usability.

eCommerce Development:

The First Scribe development team, led by Jason Barney, took the polished design from the Lyle Swift team and bolted it to an extremely-customized iteration of the Magento eCommerce platform.  The Magento installation includes custom features such as an AJAX product sort and a new product-zoom tool with all the functionality (and none of the monthly fees) of similar functionality offered by Scene7 or Fluid.

A Multi-store functionality within Magento allows us to quickly roll out the ecommerce functionality to Pour La Victore’s sister brand, Kelsi Dagger.  The mobile website platform, dedicated zoom tool, AJAX product sort, and fulfillment interface attach to a shared back-end for all forthcoming Plv Studio Inc. brands.

Sabo and the rest of the team at Pour La Victoire manage customers, orders, promotions and rewards points from one-large administration tool in Magento for all of their future sites.

Kudos to the teams!

The team at First Scribe is proud to be a part of such a great collaboration!  Kudos to the teams on a truly fantastic product!

Pour La Victoire Discount Code:

We have created a special discount code for you Blog readers out there.  Save $50 off your first order by using the discount code LAUNCH.

Posted in First Scribe, Magento eCommerce | No Comments »

 

 

Google’s New Panda Algorithm

Friday, May 13th, 2011

Back in February Google released a new search algorithm in the U.S. and later in April released the algorithm worldwide. Amit Singhal and Matt Cutts explained the update, which was nicknamed Panda, in a blog post on February 24, 2011:

“This update is designed to reduce rankings for low-quality sites—sites which are low-value add for users, copy content from other websites or sites that are just not very useful. At the same time, it will provide better rankings for high-quality sites—sites with original content and information such as research, in-depth reports, thoughtful analysis and so on.” source

Their main targets during this update have been content farms and, as previously stated, low-quality sites. The plan is to remove them from the upper ranks of the search engine results page so people are receiving trustworthy and relevant information.

Within days of the release, the update had affected 12% of the search queries through Google. In a blog post from May 6, 2011, Amit Singhal gave some guidance on how to work with Panda. Here are some questions to ask yourself about your website:

  • Would you trust the information presented in this article?
  • Would you be comfortable giving your credit card information to this site?
  • Would users complain when they see pages from this site?
  • Would you expect to see this article in a printed magazine, encyclopedia or book?
  • Does the page provide substantial value when compared to other pages in search results?

How Are We Reacting?
Google’s new focus on “quality content” has us concentrating on delivering great blog content and verifying we have meaningful on and off site links.

Using a blog delivers quality content relative to your company or industry while also linking on and off your site. In addition, blogs are easy to update consistently, which keeps Google happy.

Along with blog content, link building has to be much more precise. If Google considers the link a“low-quality-site”, it will lead to the page rank being hurt. In addition, Panda is looking more at social sites, which means offsite linking could be a great way to help SEO.

Even though Panda has been out for a few months, people are still trying to figure out how this will affect their sites long term. We are reacting based upon our findings and feel we are successfully working with the new Google algorithm.

Extra Reading:
Wired.com’s interview about Panda with Google’s Amit Singhal & Matt Cutts.
Cnet’s Panda analysis.

Posted in Content, Search Engine Optimization | No Comments »