Marvel Internet Group blog

It is about 1month since we started building JustRosters, and what a month it has been! Paul, Alan and I are working on it full time at the moment, and hope to have it complete launched in around 2weeks. The original plan shows building the front-end website as step 6, but in reality this was happening at the same time as the code writing. We finished the front-end ‘store front’ first, so it’s time to share some of our experience and results (print screens can be found after the fold).

We had already established a basic look and feel while designing the back-end mock-ups, so the front-end needed to become an extension of that. Like any web entrepreneur, I spent a few hours half my life looking at other ‘successful’ sites with a similar target market, noting down design and navigation elements I liked. I built a basic sitemap in notepad, and started writing copy for each page. The sitemap went like this:

• Homepage
• Why JustRosters?
• Pricing and signup
• Order pages (linked from pricing and signup page)
• Affiliate program
• Login page x 3 (for administrators, staff, affiliates)
• Contact us page
• Any legal pages I needed + a sitemap, 404 page etc.

If you take out all the ‘standard’ web application pages I was left with 4. The homepage, the ‘why’ page, the pricing page and the affiliate program page. These had to be ‘conversion kings’, so I was intent on making them perfect.

It’s funny, most people think a designer is responsible for what a website ANY type of interface ends up looking like, but I think the copy writer has an equal part in the end product. The words we chose ultimately decide how each page can fit together. After what felt like an eternity of writing and re-writing sales copy, (ok, it was only about 4days), I got Alan onto the designs.

Nothing builds excitement quite like watching a front-end site come together in front of you. I was extremely impressed by how it was unfolding, and found it hard to stop hitting the refresh button every 5mins Alan was working on it. Here are some screen shots of what we came up with:

There is still a lot to do between scripting the home-page demo movie, having the legal guys go over the legal stuff and getting all the copy re-checked by a cool little Aussie start-up called Editeam. The semi-completion of the front-end has provided a huge psychological boost for the team and an opportunity to go get some feedback from some of the people I contacted way back in stage 1.

Hour logs show about 40 hours spent on copy writing and 75 on design. It might sound like a lot for a 15 page site, but I figure the difference between a 4% conversion rate and a 2% conversion rate could be the difference between becoming a millionaire or just a 500thousandaire

Tags: front-end, justrosters.com, web design

This entry was posted on Monday, February 16th, 2009 at 5:51 pm and is filed under justrosters.com, marvelig, marvelsites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.