I am playing around with some major portal sites in China for the fashion and beauty channels watching how they do the product guidance. Here is something I found on women.sohu.com, women.sina.com and yoka.com (a vertical site here just for comparison).

Ok, let’s start with the product guidance on the home page of beauty channels.

We can see there are two different strategy.

Sina Women divided the content into two big categories first: function and brand nationality. Then, in every category, we see the clear major sub-class, which is skin care, make up, body care, hair care and perfume for the first line of ‘Function’ while the second line for ‘brand nationaly’ includes sub-class of Europe and US, Japan and Korea, and China.

Sohu Women uses a vertical tab box to divide the content into there categories, which is Brands, Function and Product type. It seems very similar as the Sina one, however, in each tab page, there are dozens of links which takes some time to find out ‘ L’oreal Pairs‘ in Brand, or ‘Eye Shadow’ in Product Type. On the other hand, I doubt why they use tab box for the major guidance because tabs pages dose not make much sense for most of Chinese netizen.

I also find this guidance on Yoka.com. It does not serve as the navigation guidance on the top of the page but it also provides a very good way of dividing and classifying the content.

Next important guidance, or index may be more appropriate, is the page gateway for brands. In fashion and beauty industry, ‘brand’ is everything and consumers tends to search for what they want by ‘brand’. Therefore, most of the sites put great efforts in building a ‘complete brand collection’ to help their users.

Let’s take a look at this index design from Sohu and Yoka.

Both of these sites use alphabet for the index. The difference is Sohu provides brand logo so that some of the female users can find the brand easily (yes, women are graphic oriented). Sohu provides a left column for hot brands, functions and Q&A. However, Yoka’s product design has its advantages as well. For example it is more informative in one page and it’s takes less clicks to find a brand.

So what is my favourite  way of categorization?  Here I would show a guidance from a Taobao Shop.

click to see the whole picture

Well, my point is there is no right or wrong in guidance and index designs. The key is to suit the users behavior and provide good experience in helping the user finding out what they want. It puts the function, the brand nationality, the hot recommendations and best selling stuff altogether in a tiny space. This Taobao shop has been running for years and it is very successful in business. The shop owner is not a user experience expert or product design professional. However, she or he manages to make this index into a very informative and helpful index. I stop again and again here to check out what to buy.

Good product design ease the difficulty for users to operate and great design brings business!

The focus pictures are very important to a portal site, as important as the cover of a magazine, or a poster for a movie.

To make an attractive focus picture is the essential work for fashion website editors. It shows the top content and the position of the site and shows the taste and style of site as well. Therefore, we can absolutely judge the site by its ‘focus’

In this article of Showcase of Beautiful Fashion Websites Steven Snell summarized some of the trends in Fashion websites.

Large Photos

Naturally, and industry that is very dependent on image will make heavy use of photos and models. Many of the sites use large background images, some will use a slideshow type of approach to feature multiple photos. Going a step further from photos, some of the sites use large video areas on the homepage.

Black and White

Black, white and gray color schemes are very popular among the sites showcased here. Simple color schemes are capable of creating an elegant look, plus with so many colorful photos it helps to keep focus on the products rather than on other design elements.

Minimal Content on Homepage

There are a few different types of sites showcased here. Most are sites that belong to a particular designer or fashion brand, while other are fashion news sites. Those that are news sites will obviously include a larger amount of content, which means a homepage that can be very involved. However, looking at the sites that represent a designer or a brand, you will see that the majority have very little content on the homepage. In some cases the homepage is nothing more than a large photo and a navigation menu.

However, I would say those key elements are very basic ones for fashion sites because of the following reasons:

1. Fashion is absolutely a visual business. From the designers, brand companies, productions, to the shows, models, boutiques and consumers, they are all visual oriented. So can you imagine they play a part in this industry chain without clear visual images?
2. Most of the smart and outstanding fashion sites are designed in black and white because the fashion items and the models are so COLOURFUL. I happy the site designers finally understand this basic rule that the best platform to let your colourful stuff to standout, is to make the others black and white.
3. Why minimal content is new and trendy to fashion sites? It’s always a rule in fashion magazines, right? Since the users of fashion site is largely the some group of people who are fashion magazine readers, site designers should be careful with the strong user habit formed long ago by magazine reading.

Anyway, I would say Mr. Steven Snell has done a good job in collecting fashion site design style and summarizing them.

Please also see the show case of some fabulous fashion sites and you would love them as I do, but just don’t shop that much as the ecomics’ so bad now.

I sit in several advertising courses during the graduate school time and Raphael was a 70 years old professor who taught one of theme. And he told us the story of ‘TINA’.

About 50 years ago, there was a very beautiful girl whose name was Tina. She wanted to be young Raphael’s girl friend and told him that ‘You know, Ralph, my name is Tina, which means There Is No Alternative! So you must accept me as your girlfriend.’ Raphael smiled and said, ‘Dear Tina, however, I see the name as Think In a New Arena’.

We all know this is only a joke. The understanding of TINA could be so different. No matter in Project management or in daily life, when we see THERE IS NO ALTERNATIVE, maybe we can THINK IN a NEW ARENA.

Finally I got invited to P1. cn. It has been a long time that I want to know what’s happening behind this black log-in page. I asked the product manager in P1, who used to work for Sina.com, but she said she used all the quota up. However, there comes an email said that last May, I was taken picture of by a P1 photographer and then I got the pass to this site.

Just a glance, you would know the style is so fancy and sexy while the content focus on night life, luxury and fashion stuff. Yes, this might be the first member only website that focus on high end fashion and night life.  With the founder who is a Chinese guy born and lived in north Europe, the original idea is to follow a Swedish site who’s major in party reports and night life community.

A friend on Twitter also told me that after server months try out, they find the ‘night life people’ here in Beijing and Shanghai are very different from those in Europe. Then they try to turn around and focus on younger generation, which means adding more street shooting and dressing guides. (This is how I had a chance to step into the site.)

However, I still doubt in how far this site can go. It regards its homepage as a ‘P1 Magazine’, just like what you see in th previous picture; it regards the member area as a community and offers some SNS feature like making friends and play with your friends; in addition, it also regarded as a vertical fashion sites as many people may agree.

Let’s step back and think, who is P1’s the audiences? How can P1 earn money? Can the site be sticky for its ideal audiences? So far, as the ‘night animals’ and ‘fashion fans’ are still two small and blur groups, I hope P1 can finally find the answer.