solutions

A friend of mine has been having trouble with his business, 88 Monks. It’s an apparel line that has both and online “presence” and a physical store-front. The twist is that 88 Monks is an apparel line that also offers consignment, meaning that he will have other brands being sold on his shop. The reason why “presence” is in quotation is because he really doesn’t have an online nor a physical presence. His marketing tactics are guerilla, meaning that he only focuses on stickers and word-of-mouth, but they have had no real impact on the success of his physical store-front. His social media presence is also lacking. There are many problems but for now, I want to focus on the website and the problems with it before talking about his social media presence and the lack of marketing.

Below are screenshots of the before/current pictures of 88 Monks. The pics aren’t seamless (one page) because I’m writing this up at my day job and I don’t have Photoshop here.

Now, I actually like this landing page (or what I thought was a landing page). The banner is decent, the site pages are visible and there’s a video to catch the viewer’s eye. If someone clicks on the video, bam, you got someone sitting on your page for a minute and 27 seconds and you’ve sparked their interests for more content.

But what do they get when they scroll down? An online shop. And an online shop that is severely lacking in quality. I’m not talking about design because I’ve seen worse sell for more but I’m talking about the layout. The second row of this shop has only one picture placed on the far right. Why? There’s no reason it should be like this.

Also, this shop does not have consistency, which is key to having a successful online shop. The images are mixed with stock pictures of white tee with graphics laced over it and actual product shots. There’s also one picture with a completely different background. How will you ever gain the customer’s trust with a shop looking really suspicious and low-quality?

Oh there’s more scrolling? An about page? On the landing page? Why? There’s a separate page for that on the first picture.

And then there’s random pictures? Looks like a Tumblr or Instagram feed placed right on the landing page. I’m feeling overwhelmed here!

To sum it all up, it’s clutter. It’s just too much information. Sure it may look nice at first but when you scroll down, you see a shop that’s inconsistent and has bugs, an about section that doesn’t really say much, and many many pictures that makes you feel overwhelmed. Plus, this page is not configured correctly to be picked up by any search engine.

I’ll fix this.

ChoyBoy Solutions

ChoyBoy Solutions: Updated “About” Page

ChoyBoy Solutions: A Constant Work in Progress