Another Facelift for Tamron
Commack, NY June 15 – When it comes to camera lenses, Tamron is the leader worldwide. They have consistently created lenses that most professionals use as their preferred lens of choice.
In late fall of 2009, discussions began with Skylar Design about redesigning the upper third section of the Tamron photo lens landing page. With a large amount of visitors visiting this area of the site and the expressed desire by customers to have quicker access to more information from one location, Tamron came to Skylar with this challenge.
Tamron Objectives
- Create wider Flash window to showcase images
- Make the featured camera lenses area from a three to a four column layout
- Remove news panel and featured items and replace it with a unique style set of buttons (four columns, two rows with the ability to add another row.)
- New buttons must be editable, yet elegant and still SEO friendly
Skylar Design’s Solution
Making adjustments to the Flash movie and adding another column to the featured lenses area wasn’t too difficult. However, when it came to conceptualizing how the button area and the actual buttons would look, that posed a new set of challenges. These buttons had to complement the existing page design.
With the last redesign of the Tamron website, the strategy was to move away from a very “hard” look to one that embraced a more subtle appeal. Action items, section headers, specific regions, navigation sections still had to be clearly delineated. However, we felt a “softer” more cleaner design would have a greater impact on communicating to the consumer the value of Tamron products. Since then, the results have only confirmed that strategy.
As for the button challenge, Skylar decided to design a library of buttons that appeared to be embedded directly into the page, yet still appeared as if they were raised. In other words, the buttons still had to be clearly buttons. The code was written optimally so additional rows could be added in just a few seconds. It is that simple. It was also written so search engines could differentiate each button instead of using the traditional all-in-one graphic where it was just another image.
In general, the new page is consistent with the last redesign efforts by Skylar. Justin Agoglia, Principal/Web Technologist of Skylar Design, states that, “Whenever I’m asked to redesign a section of a page, I’m careful not to make the design look as if something was obviously changed. My work should look seamless, as if nothing has been changed all along.”
View the live website: Tamron Photo Landing Page (URL)
View the design as it was provided to Tamron: Tamron Photo Landing Page (PDF)
Skylar Design is an award-winning national web design and consulting firm based in New York and Virginia. Skylar helps clients discover, design and deploy strategic web-based and technical solutions. Our website services include consulting, domain registration and management, web hosting, customized web designs, CSS and XHTML programming, and website maintenance. Skylar Design: your web design and development team. Specialties: User Interface Design, HTML, XHTML, CSS, Usability, Web Standards Advocate