PROJECT

The Mall Website

The Mall portfolio consists of 6 branded shopping centres throughout the UK. The class-leading sites hosts the six centres with a common brand and back-end systems, taking advantage of the group ownership to achieve economies of scale and very advanced content platform. Of Colour & Code’s Kris Hunt managed the project for The Mall including planning, technical and creative agency selection, management and implementation across the business.

It was a 6 month project from brief to launch and building a site of this size and complexity in that time is no mean feat. What the average visitor sees on the site is the tip of the iceberg, the site has been built to act as a hub for a number of the business’s marketing activities, and the behind the scenes technical works include linkages with The Mall’s CRM database, multiple data imports and exports, content APIs feeding information to their loyalty app, retailer affiliate links and product feeds.

At the time of launch traffic from mobile devices was around 40% of all visits to the site so a completely responsive approach was needed to ensure the site functioned well on all devices, and to remove the management pains associated with managing multiple sets of content on desktop and mobile sites. Currently nearly 60% of traffic is now from mobile devices and the site receives over 1million visits a year.

View the site

The new site ushered in a fresh, bold, new look for The Mall and completely modernised the site, parts of which had been in existence since the previous incarnation launched in 2006. The core brief was to add relevance to The Mall’s core brand proposition of ‘Shopping as it should be’ and provide a better space for promotions and activities to shine.

The brief

  • Improve the UX while restructuring the site to place the emphasis on the local centres
  • Give more prominence to individual retailers within the centres, including product event and job listings
  • Provide greater integration with social media channels for the centres and retailers
  • Support retailer and central Mall click & collect services
  • Provide automation where possible for data feeds and database integration to reduce load on the marketing team
  • Produce a site with industry-leading design and usability
  • Provide a very flexible content system that still allowed for structured local CMS access with approval processes.
  • Provide a responsive solution to supply one content set across all devices
  • Support future refurbishment and development works across the centres