Having recently undergone a rebrand, The Arkive (the Beggars Group archive dept) was very much in need of a new website. The existing site was tired, not very mobile-friendly and had a homepage that was focused on social media feeds rather than products. The Arkive had been steadily increasing their output of award winning reissues and special editions and they needed a website that could really show off their work. The existing site had a wealth of content so I made the decision to re-organise much of that, rather than start from scratch.

The analytics revealed that most of the traffic to the site came via social media, particularly Facebook, so the old homepage’s social media feeds were really just duplicating content for users. I replaced this with an entirely e-commerce focused homepage, displaying the full catalog with filtering, sorting and search options to aid exploration, courtesy of Isotope.js, and a slick carousel at the top to call out releases of note.

I introduced artist pages to the site structure to collect and showcase all of the releases by artist and add context to their careers with bios, photo galleries and press clippings.

Product pages now have photo galleries to showcase the packaging of each release and curated related releases to encourage further exploration.