We hinted in our last post that we had a new Info Centre on the way, and I’m pleased to say that it’s now fully live and ready for use!
Our Info Centre brings together all our information articles across the site, into a single place where they can be browsed and navigated more easily. Not just that, but we think it looks pretty good too!
You can check out our new Info Centre here, and as always, we’d love to heard your thoughts on what you think about it.
We’ve been busy updating our information centre on buyakilt.com. Our latest article gives a little back ground on Tartan Day.
Held on April 6th, this relatively unknown event (in Scotland) is growing in popularity, especially in the USA and Canada. As far as we’re concerned another day to celebrate our Scottish Heritage is never a bad thing.
You can view the Tartan Day article by clicking here.
Let us know via Facebook or Twitter how you’ll be celebrating.
When made a small change to our kilts category today that makes it easier to find the kilt you’re looking for.
Previously, our range of kilts were split between 4 sub-categories, so you could only view one range of kilts at a time.
Today, we’ve put all of our kilts into a single category, so that you can compare them side by side. We’ve also added a couple of filters so that you can narrow down the list a little.
We’ve been trialling this change for a few weeks and the feedback has been that having all the kilts together is much better, so we’ve rolled it out for everyone today.
View our full range of kilts at buyakilt.com/kilts.
We introduced an improvement to our tartan panel today that makes it roughly 60% faster!
I love it when we find improvements like this that make the user experience much nicer.
You can test it out on any of our products that are custom made in any tartan, such as our traditional 8 yard kilt.
We’ve introduced 3 new features in our site search functionality today.
The first new feature is the inclusion of tartan results into the regular site search.
Searching our tartan database can be done through the dedicated tartan page. However, the tartan search box is not on every page, and a few people try searching for tartans in the product search box.
To help people find what they’re looking for, we’ve introduced a link before the product results, linking to any tartans which match the keywords you’ve searched for.
For example, if you search for ‘Royal Stewart’, the product search will return all the products with the words ‘royal + stewart’ in them, but now there’s also a link to Royal Stewart tartans right at the top of the page.
The second new feature relates solely to product search results. We’ve spent some time working on the relevancy of our search results to make all the results returned, and particularly the first few, more relevant to the search query.
For example, a search for ‘Royal Stewart’ used to return our Diana Memorial tartan rug as the number 1 result. This is a “royal” tartan and pattern is based on the ‘Royal Stewart’ tartan, but it’s not the most relevant result for the search term in question.
The updated search results feature the same items, but the order is tweaked to be more relevant with Royal Stewart tartan products appearing first.
The third feature we’ve introduced also relates to product search results. We’ve introduced a ‘did you mean’ feature which attempts to correct mis-spellings in search queries. The good thing about it is that it will only suggest products that are actually in our store so shouldn’t give you non-relevant suggestions.
We’ve also got this feature in our tartan search for tartan mis-spellings.
Finding your perfect kilt can be a tricky process and can daunt even the most seasoned shopper!
Thankfully, we know lots about kilts, so we can help you along that path. However, it’s important that we try to do that without confusing you with the plethora of options available!
One such confusing option is tartan cloth width. The width of a cloth is literally how wide the fabric comes off the loom. If the mill has very wide loom, you get a very wide cloth, if it has a narrow loom, you get a narrow cloth. The wider the cloth, the bigger you can make garments, without having to stitch two or more pieces together.
In reality there are very few products we sell that need a wide cloth. The most common item which needs a wide cloth is a plaid.
Traditionally, most mills used a wide loom to make cloths about 60″ wide. When making an 8 yard kilt, a kilt maker would purchase only 4 yards of this cloth and cut it down the middle to create two lengths of 4 yards, stitch them end to end and conceal the seam in one of the pleats at the rear of the kilt.
However, one of the largest mills, House of Edgar, switched to making most cloths in single width – around 30″ wide. This is fine for kilts as you just order 8 yards of fabric, but doesn’t suit anything that needs cloth wider than 30″.
We thought it was important for customers to let customers know about this when they were choosing a tartan so on our cloth selection page, we showed a swatch, the mill, the price and the width of the cloth. We also showed the actual price per metre, so single width cloths appeared to be half the price of double width cloths.
We found that this confused more customers than it helped, so have changed the layout of this page to make the width of each cloth less prominent, and have altered the price of single width cloths to display as an effective double width price.
We’ve spoken with some customers about this and we feel the new change makes the step of choosing your cloth that little bit easier. What do you think? Do you need to see the width while you’re choosing a cloth?
The change is now live on our site: check out the Macdonald Modern (my favourite… helps that I’m a Macdonald as well!) and the rest of our tartans and let us know what you think.
You may remember back in June I blogged about some subtle changes we made to how we display the great range of kilt outfits we have on buyakilt.com. Well we weren’t quite finished there and as such have been busy beavering away in our efforts to offer an even better, streamlined experience for any intrepid outfit hunter.
As a result we are proud to present our new, improved, life enhancing (well, maybe not that last one..) range of kilt outfits! Now the first thing you may ask yourself is: where have all the outfits gone? This would be a perfectly reasonable thing to ask as it is by far our biggest change – we have cut our range from a staggering 54 outfits down to 34, and 10 outfit categories down to 6.
This was done to maintain a more streamlined approach and surprisingly you will find that even though we have cut the amount of outfits by roughly 40%, the actual choice within those outfits is as good as if not better than it was previously. Let me explain…
Previously for all formal kilt outfits we had a contemporary version and a traditional version of each style (eg. Contemporary Prince Charlie Budget Outfit and Traditional Prince Charlie Budget Outfit). At the time this made perfect sense as it allowed us to offer a choice of styles within the range, but what we found was that it led to a rather inflated amount of outfits. Now, as both outfits were essentially the same (with a few key differences such as shirt, tie and waistcoat) the most logical thing to do was to combine the outfits (eg. Budget Prince Charlie Kilt Outfit) and offer a choice of outfit styles within the outfit. It seems so obvious now that we think of it! This led to a dramatic reduction of outfits in the formal range.
Within the casual range we had a whole host of outfit styles – Casual Outfits, Deluxe Casual Outfits, Rugby Casual Outfits, Irish Casual Outfits etc etc etc. In other words, way too many for any sane person to make their choice. Again, with a bit of clever tinkering we were able to combine a whole host of these outfits and brought them all together under the fantastic title – Casual Outfits.
Now again you may think that your choice of outfits has been greatly reduced, but that is where our Create Your Own range come in. Our Custom Formal Kilt Outfit and Custom Casual Kilt Outfit have all the options you could get in any of the budget outfits but with the added beauty of being able to pick which items you do (or don’t) want. Combine this with a whole host of added options spread through all our outfits and we hope you will agree that these changes will not simply streamline your shopping experience, but also improve it!
Love the changes? Hate the changes? We look forward to any thoughts. As always you can find us in the usual places on Twitter and Facebook.
Our tartan finder has been given a makeover, and we think the new look is pretty nice!
So… What’s New?
We’ve put in a search box on all pages, with the A-Z navigation right underneath it. To help you know exactly what you’re searching on, we wrapped the search box in tartan!
We’ve introduced the same navigation bar showing you how many tartans are in your current selection, allowing you to view more or less per page and the page navigation section.
Now the important bit – the actual tartan images! Firstly, we’ve made them larger and square and made them the same size as our product images.
When you select a tartan, you’ll see the cloths available in that tartan. We’ve tidied that up a bit, with a cleaner design.
We’ve also done the same on the individual cloth page.
As always, we hope you like the changes and we love to hear your feedback. Let us know what you think via Facebook, Twitter or by leaving a comment below.
This post is part of a regular series about improvements to our website. Read others here.
Our tartan finder has been given some great new features today.
The first one is the new tartan finder homepage:
You can browse tartans by letter, or search for a particular pattern. We’ve also included some links to some of our favourite tartans.
When you’ve chosen a tartan you get a list of products available in that tartan. Our second new feature is that we now show you the important details of the tartan you’ve chosen right at the top of that page.
We hope these new features will help you find your tartan and help you choose just what products you want it to be made into!
Don’t worry… our quest hasn’t stopped here… we have lots more improvements to include in the near future. We’re always looking at ways to make our tartan finder easier to use, and more useful and I’ll make sure to write a post when we roll out our next update.
Let us know what you think of the new updates, or let us know what you’d like our tartan finder to do, by contacting us via Facebook, Twitter or by leaving a comment below.
We’ve just put some helpful new measuring guides online which you can find here: Measuring Guides.
We know that it’s difficult buying clothes without trying them on, especially if they’re being custom made for you! However, taking a couple of minutes to get accurate measurements before ordering means that your brand new kilt is much more likely to fit perfectly.
As always, we’d love some feedback on what you think of them. Drop us an email, leave a comment or give us a call to let us know how they could be improved.
