Make Form and Function Work Together
	By Kevin Fleming | April 19, 2008

We have recently been approached by two different companies asking us to fix the back-end of their E-Commerce solutions. Both of these online stores have beautiful front-end designs. However when you take a look at the back-end of these sites or “under the hood” you’ll notice that although it looks like they are driving a 2008 Ferrari, the car really has the engine of a 1975 Volkswagen. Obviously this car isn’t going to win a race, and it might not even make it around the track.

I want to compare the elements of these E-Commerce sites to that of a car because trying to run a successful E-Commerce business can be a lot like trying to win an auto race. You need to have a car that runs seamlessly with a minimal amount of time spent in the pit stop. You don’t want to have to pull in to the pit stop to have your tires changed every two laps. When you do need a pit stop you want to have a pit crew that can get you back out on the track fast.

In the case of an E-Commerce store you can’t have your employees bogged down with problems every day just to keep your store up and running. You need to have a strong, reliable back-end that delivers the same experience to both your employees on the back-end and the customers on the front-end every day of the week.

The Le Mans is a 24 hour race world class auto race that takes an amazing amount of persistence and endurance to win. Not only do you need a reliable car, but you need drivers with enough persistence to last 24 hours. To have an E-Commerce store capable of winning the Le Mans you need to establish a persistent and on-going search engine optimization strategy. This means that you need to be constantly analyzing visitor trends and analytics and making optimizations to your site based on this data. If you are persistent, over time you can achieve tremendous growth by using search engine optimization techniques.

With all of that said, to have a successful E-Commerce store you need to create a back-end and front-end that embrace both form and function and allowing these two elements to co-exist. Legendary cars like the Ford GT-40 (a car that won the Le Mans, pictured above.) aren’t by any means ugly. They were masterfully crafted so that form and function worked together. I think that architect and engineer Frank Lloyd Wright said it best “Form follows function-that has been misunderstood. Form and function should be one, joined in a spiritual union.”

Filed under: Design, Information |