by Oscar Foulkes on October 7, 2010
| Slingshot’s most recent ecommerce project is one that has involved me on a more personal level than most. For starters, I am connected to ‘the client’ by marriage. Then, cooking is one of my favourite recreational activities, so I got very involved (with the entire Dish team, of course) in assembling the product range. Many of these – like red wine jus, or the curry base – are time-consuming sauces that are most efficiently and effectively produced in a professional kitchen, but when deployed in a home environment make it very easy for ordinary cooks to be culinary legends.
So, it’s all about making the resources of a professional kitchen available to home cooks, via a simple-to-use online shop.
For Dish Foodmarket I tried my hand at a bit of food photography, as there wasn’t budget to hire a professional. I also wrote the copy, but that is a task I’m unlikely to have handed over to a ‘professional’, even if there was budget available.
It’s great to have taken another step into the world of online retail. A few more of these and Slingshot may need to start describing itself as an ecommerce specialist! |
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by slingshot on August 31, 2010
Dish Food & Social, one of South Africa’s leading caterers, had operated with the same website for nearly five years. There was a serious need to upgrade not only the look and feel, but also the functionality.
Slingshot developed a concept based upon using many, beautiful food pictures as a way of communicating the quality and creativity of Dish’s offering. Some of the images were used as revolving images, with picture galleries forming the backbone of this component of the website.
Slingshot worked closely with the designer in achieving the intended result, and then implemented the design using WordPress. Building the site in WordPress ensured maximum user-friendliness, enabling the client to add or change content when necessary.
The initial conclusions one can draw from the Google Analytics is that visitors to the site are spending several minutes and viewing multiple pages while there, so Dish is getting the benefit of the traffic to its website. A large percentage of the traffic is ‘organic’ (i.e. from search engines), suggesting that the SEO (search engine optimisation) is sound.
The Slingshot website philosophy is that they not only need to look good, they also have a job to do. Beauty may be in the eye of the beholder, but numbers don’t lie. |
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