The Shopping Experience: Great Websites

[Kropotkin]

Good morning.

I'm hoping to produce a list of beautiful, well-designed websites catering to the vaping community. These can be high end or low end, juice oriented or gear oriented - just so long as they're good looking, well organized and pleasant to use.



My current fave is Local Vapor, which I just recently discovered. Not only do these guys have a really impressive collection of stuff on offer, but they've also produced a site that's simple, classy, and fabulously well organized:

Atomizers – localvape

No head-ache-inducing graphics, no weird linky-things that pop up all over the place, and no photos of tropical sunsets and elaborate desserts in the juice section. Awesome!




What's your favorite?

 

[Vchick]

I'm sure that we can all find a few, unfortunately great websites don't always translate into great shopping experiences..

 

[Rosenec]

101 Vape
Great prices

 

[Kropotkin]

I'm sure that we can all find a few, unfortunately great websites don't always translate into great shopping experiences..

Okay . . . Are you talking about customer service, price, shipping time . . . ? There are tons of threads on those things.

I was specifically asking about web design here - I happen to be interested in it - but if you really want to drag in that other stuff - go for it. I guess.

 

[klynnn]

I think the Gotvapes site has the best pictures. As far as finding something there it could be a lot better.

 

[Kropotkin]

^ That's true. GotVapes shows every item from many different angles, which can be very helpful.

I agree with you about their navigation functions, too - they're pretty dismal. Plus there's waaay too much extraneous text on each page, and too many irrelevant images and links throughout. The overall feeling I get from that site is just kind of jumbled and messy - not what I'd call well-designed at all.

 

[klynnn]

I agree, looks like most of their pics are taken on mirrors which gives a very nice look.

 

[HecticEnergy]

I'm a Gotvapes.Com patron too, but as a software engineer, their site sucks. I agree the content and product selection is good, and from order to Vape time is AWESOME! Their site REALLY needs help though.

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's the canned cms (content management system) they are using. There are MUCH better canned cms options than what they are using.
Go to gotsmok.com hit there coupon page. There are a TON of vendors with sites of ranging quality. Look for the link at the bottom for where they got their cms package.

Gotvapes.Com is great in all the ways that really matter. And as far as their crap cms, I've seen worse. It's just a little more difficult to browse than it needs to be. I'm a happy Gotvapes.Com customer.

Sent from my SGH-T999 using Tapatalk

 

[Kropotkin]

I'm not 100% sure, but I think it's the canned cms (content management system) they are using. There are MUCH better canned cms options than what they are using.

Go to gotsmok.com hit there coupon page. There are a TON of vendors with sites of ranging quality. Look for the link at the bottom for where they got their cms package.

Oh, interesting. Thank you, Junk.

I was looking at it primarily from the aesthetic point of view, but I'll make it a point to do exactly what you suggest.

 

[Nado]

i'm a fan of this site and the customer service is amazing in the Canada store. Simplicity is all that is needed, this site looks like a very simple, standard template site. We know what we want, all we need is someone to give it to us without the added cost of a website worth 50k.

http://www.electronic-cigz.com/

 

[HecticEnergy]

Oh, interesting. Thank you, Junk.

I was looking at it primarily from the aesthetic point of view, but I'll make it a point to do exactly what you suggest.

Your welcome. As far as aesthetics go..... I'm the wrong person! Hehe
I'm a very functionally minded person. I can appreciate good aesthetics, but I'd prefer things that are logical: search bar in the top left corner. I like to browse the sites some times to find new things, but if I want to find something quickly it should be just that, quick.

I like how ECF has their main page template set up:
Login/logout at the top (if this was a vendor, I'd expect to see cart functionality up there too)
Search bar on the right edge of the menu ribbon
....menu ribbon that shows what is available on the site by category!

 

[HecticEnergy]

i'm a fan of this site and the customer service is amazing in the Canada store. Simplicity is all that is needed, this site looks like a very simple, standard template site. We know what we want, all we need is someone to give it to us without the added cost of a website worth 50k.

Premium Electronic Cigarettes | Electronic Cigz | Electronic Cigarettes Canada USA

There are a lot of good thigs here, but I think having your products listed by name on the left is limiting. I'd rather see a menu bar at the top with different categories for their offerings.. Tanks/clearo/drippers/rebuildables, batteries/mods(ego, APV, mech)

Other than that it seems very useful and clean (not a lot to get in the way of browsing and searching - I didn't play with it much though)

 

[HecticEnergy]

If your asking for a cool idea for a site (which you're not) it would be cool if you could build your own set up (like with dell and hp and what not), and buy and review like that..

 

[Kropotkin]

No, I'm not planning to make a site; I'm just very much interested in this kind of stuff.

Whenever I visit a commercial site of any kind, I always notice the overall aesthetic first, and then wonder what sort of person this particular look was meant to attract. If this is some huge company like LLBean, say, this is no doubt an established design firm of some kind, so the answers are usually fairly obvious. But in the vaping world the companies are tiny, so the whole thing gets a lot more interesting and quirky.

Take a site like Five Pawns, for instance. That site is clearly trying very hard to look exclusive and expensive, and uses some very typical design strategies to achieve that pared down, upscale vibe. (Does anybody else hate the way the FP site jumps around crazily if you hover on anything longer than a nanosecond? I find that incredibly annoying.) So that one's obvious maybe, but some are much less so, and those are the ones I find intriguing.

I dunno. Maybe I'm nuts, but I thought maybe others noticed things like that too.