Velvet Coat

Velvet Coat, a metro-chic women's clothing boutique, contacted us about creating a fun, but functional, informational website. They wanted a site where customers could browse Velvet Coat’s featured clothing lines, footwear, handbags and accessories as well as find out some information about the store.  We were able to deliver a website that later won a Silver Addy Award in February of 2009.

Starting From Scratch

Velvet Coat had actually worked with other companies to create a website before approaching Small Dot. For whatever reason, those past attempts at creating a website didn’t work out so it was critical for this project to be completed in a timely fashion and within budget.

We started out by learning as much as we could about Velvet Coat’s brand identity, its two locations, the different clothing designers they carried and the women’s clothing retail industry. In essence, we wanted to know what made Velvet Coat special.

The Design

Velvet Coat wanted a design that would be feminine, but not too girly; modern, but not cold; intuitive, but not boring. It was a challenge, but the result was an award-winning website design that definitely hit it’s mark.

A Picture is Worth 1000 Words

It quickly became apparent that Velvet Coat wanted to capture the uniqueness of all of their brands through professional photos provided by their vendors. We utilized our Lightview Photo Gallery, an elegant, yet simple, solution for displaying relatively large images on a website. We were able to showcase the vendor’s professional photographs in an easy-to-use system that had some neat “flash-like” effects.

No-Hassle Maintenance

Creating an award-winning website with some neat features is always a great thing, but if the site is too hard to maintain it will become stagnate quickly. That’s why we deployed our in-house content management system, Maestro.

Maestro allows Velvet Coat to edit virtually all of the content on their website without having to know HTML code. In fact, they never have to even see the code that generates their website. After one training session, the staff at Velvet Coat was off and running with the ability to maintain their own website quickly and easily.

The Final Result

The Velvet Coat project will always have a special place at Small Dot as it was our first website. Working with Velvet Coat was a great experience. We had the opportunity to create a beautiful website with great technical effects that is easy to use and maintain.