The 2010 Vancouver Olympics is a global event with fans from around the world watching their favorite sports, following their nation's star athletes, and, one presumes, buying Olympic merchandise from the official Olympic Store.
With so much interest and so many potential customers the Olympic Store must be robust and attractive, stable and engaging, so that technically it can handle thousands of orders per hour, while looking good. If done well, the Olympic Store, will be a shiny Gold Medal for its designers and its platform, Elastic Path.
Attractive Graphics and Colors
The Olympic Store makes excellent use of attractive and brand-focused graphics and colors. Several homepage features stand out, including how the designers used the color palette, which is drawn from the Olympic and Para-Olympic logos positioned at the top left of the page. Notice that the colors which these two logos share are seen everywhere on the site.
Curve Motif
The site graphics also make excellent and repeated use of a curve motif, which is emblematic of both the snow-covered mountains and deep-blue waves that can been seen from the host city. Vancouver, after all, is positioned immediately on the water of the Strait of Georgia and the Burrard Inlet, and yet, from the city one can also see mighty mountains on all sides. This curve motif is seen in background images; at the bottom of home-page, product-category navigation; and in site merchandising graphics.
Product Image Integration
I also like the way that product images were integrated into the home-page, product-category navigation. Several products extend above the top border, which, in my opinion, makes those images seem to stand out more.
Fly-Out Navigation
The Olympic Store's designers made nice use of fly-outs on the site's global navigation. These handsome bits of navigation include a background PNG with alpha transparency. But don't worry, the developers used the jQuery PNG Fix, to compensate for older versions of Internet Explorer.
Odd though, the fly-out is coded using an HTML table, I am forced to wonder why an unordered list wouldn't have been a better choice.
Good Product Detail Pages
The site's product detail pages make the product the star, include reviews, and offer additional products.
Cufón for Font Replacement
Checkout the font on the headers. It's not web safe, but it will work on all browsers, thanks to Cufón Font Replacement. I think it is great that such a large ecommerce site is using this solution.
Summing Up
The Olympic Store is a pretty well done ecommerce site, which can be an inspiration to designers and developers during the winter games.
