The Brief
As an avid climber and hiker, I’ve been frequenting Rock & Snow for many years as my go-to for the best outdoor gear. Everyone that works there is very knowledgable, easy going, and the best part is that they even price match! (Seriously the best gear shop EVER!) So a few years into the climbing community, Rich Gottlieb (owner) and Andrew Zalewski (manager) approached me about redesigning their website. At the time (and no offense to them), the website looked like it was from 1999, minus the flame gifs. Yikes! So, I embarked on a complete redesign and development. That was back in 2012, and I did another responsive redesign in 2017.
What We Did
In the initial website redesign back in 2012, we focused on a completely different style: clean lines, vivid outdoor images, and easy, intuitive navigation. The development was a tricky situation though. Rock and Snow are dedicated to the Nitrosell platform. In the first redesign, I found myself relying heavily of Nitrosell for the development, since they restricted access to much of their back-end code. However, in 2016/2017, my experience with development was completely different; I had full access to the HTML and CSS for their e-commerce pages. As a developer, it’s exciting to see other independent developers build and expand their services over the years. I’m quite in impressed with Nitrosell now. Their POS / online inventory integration is seamless.
The big different between the 2012 design and the 2017 design was the responsive design. These days many people purchase outdoor gear on their phones. They might out at the crag or grabbing a beer after climbing and scoping out new gear. I’ve been there, way too many times! So we really emphasized a solid multi-tier mobil menu on the new design, as well as various sorting options within the categories.
We both very proud of the intuitiveness of their new website, and I continue to work with Rock and Snow on seasonal updates.