Brenton Chin's Blog

I have found that a strong company website is very influential in my perception of a brand. A company with a great website shows that they are modern, up-to-date and customer-focused. When I have a good experience with a website, it makes me like the brand more.

A website that I really like is the MEC (Mountain Equipment Co-op) website. Right now as part of my Marketing Applications class, I am working on a client project with MEC. Through browsing their site for information, I found I had a great online experience. The tabs allow you to easily navigate through the website, and are organized in a manner that makes sense. They have a tab for each “category” of product that they offer – for example, “climb”, “bike”, “water”, “snow, etc.  Also, one can order products directly on the website to be shipped right to your doorstep. The process is very easy and user-friendly, and makes you feel like you’re right in the store. Funny enough, during class Julio used the MEC site as an example of a great website that other companies should model theirs after. I couldn’t agree more with him!

In class, we’ve been discussing “Responsive Design” in websites, and how it relates to a company’s marketing strategy. For those of you who don’t know what responsive design is, it’s a relatively new topic in online marketing today. Basically, it’s creating websites that respond to their environment where the layout of the website changes to adapt to different screen sizes. In this day and age, we access websites through the small mobile screens to giant iMac monitors. In order to save time for the web developer, the developer creates the code for a website that will work on ALL screen sizes.

For example, look at Disney.com:

Bigger Size:

Smaller Size:

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As you can see, the content is still the same, but it is just laid out differently. That’s the point of responsive design. It ensures the content of the website is the same, but it automatically modifies itself to give the person using the website the best experience. In digital marketing this is so important because people will be viewing  a company’s website through many different channels. To ensure they are taking actions that you want (such as purchasing products or joining your newsletter), it’s important to provide them the best experience possible.