Computerlove wins Waterstones account…
I just heard that the guys over at Computerlove have won the account to do all Waterstones online branding and advertising for their new e-commerce website to be launched later this year.
This is of interest to me for a number of reasons, mainly because I used to work for Computerlove and its good to keep up to date with what they’re up to and also because it will be good to see how the new Waterstones site shapes up. With Amazons markup, layout and usability being fairly average to say the least, its about time we had more e-tailers taking web standards seriously.
Waterstones have dropped amazon as their sole online partner (I never really understood this move anyway), probably realising that their high street presence isn’t worth a great deal any more (ala Dixons, HMV etc. etc.) and that they ought to really have there own online effort before their brand disappears into the online void!
In my opinion, Waterstones have made a great move signing up Computerlove. I know for a fact that as long as they give Computerlove enough control of the presentation layer (ie; they’re not just supplying photoshop layouts) – they will do a fantastic job and it will likely be xhtml compliant (at least at handover point anyway). Computerlove did a similar exercise recently for music retailer HMV, although that site now fails validation even using the xhtml transitional DTD (highly likely to be down to HMV’s content managers putting bad code into the site post-launch).
From an SEO point of view, Computerlove and Waterstones have their work cut out. Its going to take more than clean code/onsite changes to get Waterstones even making the slightest dent in the organic rankings with amazon seemingly ranking highly for every search phrase under the sun – even with their appalling markup.
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