Ribble Valley      Food Heaven

Marketing in Action: An e-critique of website design

This e-critique will explain how the traditional 4p’s (Promotion; Price; Product; and Place) marketing mix theory is modernised and implemented into a websites design. Morrison (2013) discusses how this as an e-marketing theory can be integrated throughout a website. Additionally, the full discussion will be structured within the key online design concept of the 7C’s. Yarimoglu (2014) acknowledges this concept as one that should be considered throughout the design process due to it being the criteria that creates the interaction between the visitor and website. This is important as the impressions and messages communicated with visitors through interaction is how a website communicates the 4p’s and can determine the success of online marketing (Tseng and Piller, 2011).

Introduction to Ribble Valley Food Heaven

Ribble Valley Food Heaven (RVFH) is designed to be a food tourism information site for an area in England’s North West. The area has a small and established tourism offering and this website is designed to fit alongside the current products and branding. The Ribble Valley looks to promote a high class and modern elegant image while remaining true to traditions. Furthermore, it is an area with a pricing structure that is above average to the overall region. These characteristics cover much of the key design thoughts that have gone into the building of this website.

Context

The context of website design relates to the visual aspects that a visitor receives. Sklar (2015) states design choices in the creation of websites provide the foundations for messages that are communicated. The decision to use a fresh and light beige colour was chosen due to the importance of the communicated message. RVFH was required to communicate a clean and hygienic message due to the food topic nature of the website, which this colour achieves. To compliment the beige colour the darker green was chosen due to its ability to present the traditional aspects of the area. The final colour choice, black text, provides overall clarity which is aided by the use of one font style throughout.

The design structure allows customers a smooth and crisp navigation system in order to create an easy to use experience. Zeithaml, Parasuraman and Malhata (2002) discuss how a websites ease of use has a key impact in the service quality that websites offer. The menu bar is placed in a strategic order, with the most important starting from the left. Sections, such as ‘Our Places’, are navigated through an extra loading page. Having these extra loading pages allow what would be a long and mixed content list to be separated into clear sub-sections, preventing clutter.

Connection

The connections or hyperlinks that a website has implemented into its design are an important element for its effectiveness. Miller (2008) discusses how hyperlinks bring structure to a visitor’s website experience. Particularly for RVFH the hyperlinks are an important aspect due to the sites purpose as an information portal. Every opportunity to provide external links to help in the promotion of the area and bring structure to the visitor experience is taken. Hyperlinks are also an important element for promoting the site because of the SEO benefits they bring.

Communication

How the website was to be designed to communicate information to visitors was an important consideration. As already discussed in this e-critique, the marketing mix concept relies on the communications made in order to be successful. The methods of communication chosen on RVFH are mainly focused on trying to direct customers to individual businesses. Visitors are encouraged to contact businesses direct through the promotion of contact information and hyperlinks.

Another form of communication RVFH provides to its visitors comes from downloadable documents. Morrison (2013) states that providing interactive or downloadable content can add a dynamic element to a website for the visitor.  Any documents that are made available to download must continue to provide the same impressions and branding that the website has developed.

Content

On RVFH thought has been given to the use of descriptive wording and carefully selected images due to the need to create impressions. Asefeso (2014) discusses the use of words and images as the most powerful method of communicating with visitors. RVFH has to rely heavily on the visual imagery it uses to communicate with visitors due to the nature of the product it is looking to promote. The food imagery used can heavily influence the overall impressions created of the Ribble Valley. Hall (2013) states food imagery can be a powerful attention grabber and quality indicator in tourism marketing.

All images on the site when clicked are designed to pop out. This again is done to try and help create the visual impression. Every image that is displayed on RVFH is also designed with a bevelled effect applied, also it has been applied the dark green boxes used. This effect is applied across RVFH not only to aid the visual elements by attempting to add ‘life’ to them, but also to bring continuity.

Community

The community aspect of website design deals with how visitors are able to interact with the organisation. Social media is a modern phenomenon for online marketing and can connect businesses with potentially millions of customers (Reed, 2011). It would be natural now for visitors to look for social media options and having this interaction is likely to aid the visitor experience. Facebook and Twitter as the two dominant forms of social media have been set up and designed for RVFH (Muller, 2016). These sites allow communication with individual visitors or the promotion of material to a wider audience as demonstrated. The third and final social media platform decided on was Instagram, this was chosen because of the visual nature of the website and the promotion of RVFH through images as discussed earlier in this e-critique.

Customisation

One aspect of customisation that is important for a website like RVFH is the language options of the website. Tourism websites can often attract international visitors and so having the ability to operate in a different language would be a great advantage (Katsoni, 2014). RVFH displays the option of changing the language from English along the footer of each page. Wix.com does not allow for the functionality of these options to be enabled while using the free platform. However, they have been put in place here to show how they would be featured.

Commerce

Many websites are designed to have some sort of function in order to deal with payments from customers. E-commerce sites need to display a secure payment symbol and the various methods of payment accepted. Visitors to them often take security seriously when considering the overall experience (Psaila and Wagner, 2008). Designing a website that appears secure and reassuring to the visitor will increase the positive impressions created. RVFH does not contain much relevance to the e-commerce aspect of website design, however, many of the sites it has hyperlinks to will deal with e-commerce. It is important for RVFH that all these websites operate securely in order to not reflect badly on the borough’s overall impression.

Notes

1) This website was designed and built on a free cloud based platform (wix.com), this has led to some limitations with its performance. Particularly the image scroll on the main home page, this was designed as a full width gallery, however, problems meant that images appeared out of resolution on certain screen sizes. Wix acknowledged this issue, however they are unable to make alterations until carrying out major updates. Following this it was decided to remove the full width gallery and use a more conventional image scroll, this has had a negative effect on its effectiveness however. This issues has also at times affected some of the scrolling images on other pages on RVFH.

2) Some images used for this website were taken from secondary internet sources and as such do not all appear in the hoped for higher quality when viewed in the pop-out window.  

3) The social media links set up to display how these would work have been done so under a different heading in order not to infringe on future live use of 'Ribble Valley Food Heaven.

4) On some occasions. due to the wix.com platforms, images are crashing and not loading correctly. Re-freshing the page fixes this issue.

5) Thanks is given to Ribble Valley Borough Council and Tom Pridmore for permission to create this site using their branding and for providing information and photos for the site.