DNA Furniture Site Build

This is an overview of the entire process of building this site, from early ideation to the delivered site.

Client Meeting Notes:

Our clients were Tim and Erika McClellan. Erika was our main point of contact, but Tim is the face of the company.
Initial confusion: our Erika had a different project in mind from what we initially agreed to. We ended up hearing both out and choosing this one.

Total Site Build: We settled on building a new website for DNA Furniture, a newly launched small business that sells high end furniture unassembled. The furniture comes in a box like Ikea, but the materials and construction are much higher quality.
They wanted the site to market to retailers for the time being, but they wanted to transition to selling directly from the site at some point in the future.

Our Objectives

Introduce DNA

We needed to make sure the user could quickly and painlessly learn:

What DNA Furniture is
What sets them apart
Who Tim is
How to place an order

Showcase their Work

DNA makes beautiful furniture, so we absolutely needed to show it off as much as possible. The craftsmanship and quality of the furniture is one of if not the biggest selling points foe this company, and it needed to be on display.

Tell their Story

Tim McClellan is a charismatic artist with a seriously impressive resume, so we needed to establish his credibility, and use it persuasively.

User Persona

Name: Frank Sommer

Age: 42

Location: Denver, CO

Employment: Furniture Store Owner

Family: Married with two kids

We built this site for Frank Sommer, the owner of a small furniture store in Denver. Frank wants to keep lots of high quality furniture in stock, but he does not have as much storage space as he would like. DNA is perfect for Frank, but he doesn’t know that when he first reaches the landing page. Our goal with this site was to convince him that DNA is just right for his business.

Field Research

Sites we checked out to better understand the market:

Tim McClellan Designs: https://www.timmcclellandesigns.com/
Expand Furniture: https://expandfurniture.com/
Vermont Woods Studios: https://vermontwoodsstudios.com/
Thos. Moser: https://www.thosmoser.com/

Our Design Solutions

Engaging Home Page

We made sure to touch on everything that our user persona Frank would want to know about on the homepage. We wanted to get the main ideas of DNA out as soon as possible: their furniture is high quality, it comes in a box, and you are an email away from having it in your store.

Robust Gallery

We built our gallery function into a “Collection” page, that could easily be updated to become “Collections” as DNA grows. It was important for us to keep expansion in mind and establish a style that could be used with a much larger set of products.

Informational Pages

We used informational pages to tell the story of Tim and DNA. That way, the information was available if the user is interested, but it isn’t getting in the way of more critical paths through the site.

Wireframe Prototype

Our first iteration of prototyping had the bones of what would be our final deliverable, with one major difference. At this stage, we were still considering building an online storefront into the site, which would sell and ship directly to consumers instead of retailers. If we kept this functionality, Frank might see DNA as a potential competitor as opposed to a potential partner.