Working with Capital & Regional PLC
The Mall is a shopping centre brand owned and managed by Capital & Regional PLC. They have been a client of mine for over 10 years. I’ve worked on their ever evolving online platforms, spanning responsive websites, apps, games, promotions and back office systems.
The most recent redesign of themall.co.uk was the result of a core requirement to make the website responsive and to strengthen the brand positioning of "Shopping as it should be".
To bring the brand positioning to life I developed creative concepts based on insights experienced by shoppers of all ages. "Seeing her face" tapped into the excitement and joy experienced when your child receives the gift they always wanted and "Wearing them home" came from the insight that some people can't wait and put on their new shoes before they leave the shop.
The design and technical architecture addressed the needs of a variety of users of varying capabilities. There are 7 malls in total with multiple mall managers and content editors contributing to its content and features.
Part of the brief was to design and develop an API to power the content consumed by the brands RewardMe mobile app, as well as evolving our promotion and competition manager apps that are automated through the website - with the option of publishing to social media platforms.
This was certainly one of the the largest responsive websites (and one of the first) I designed and it was the first time the team had developed such a large site using the Umbraco CMS.
The Mall is effectively 7 shopping centre websites and 1 corporate website rolled into a single site, with a number of behind the scenes applications powering the mobile app, competitions, promotions and affiliate marketing components all sitting on a single Umbraco install and all fully mobile responsive.
The project gave birth to the 'building blocks’ technical architecture which subsequently evolved into a boilerplate framework of pre-tested, fully responsive, content managed components within Umbraco that can be assembled by non-technical users and marketers to create complex and bespoke pages and ongoing promotions that work flawlessly across all devices.
