ChinaSprout - the Vision Behind the New Look


Letter from Xiaoning Wang

January 12, 2004

At ChinaSprout we are starting the New Year with some mischief, as we roll out our brand new website—just in time to celebrate the start of the Year of the Monkey! With the launch of our new design let me take this opportunity to talk about the changes in more detail, bringing them closer "to your Heart and Home" (our tagline for the first site back in 1999).

It has been over four years since ChinaSprout first saw the light of the Internet and three years since our last big re-design (this is our second, and most comprehensive revision of the website). Many things have changed and are immediately noticeable - our logo, our look & feel, and the site functionality. Other things have stayed true to its course: our huge product selection, and our popular community, to name a few.



Our website in the first year of business - pastel colors were our favorite

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

As ChinaSprout has become the most popular destination for Chinese cultural and educational products on the Internet, we have seen our target audience grow and widen from adoptive families looking for culturally relevant products and services to an increasing number of Chinese American families, schools, museums and stores, and anyone interested in Chinese culture as well. This wonderful mix allows us to expand our categories of products offered, enhance our services for everyone, and create a true multicultural community - something we are very excited about.

As buying products on the Internet is becoming much more common and "second nature" for many of you today, we started the re-design process with a few tests and surveys with the results immediately confirming that it was about time for a change for ChinaSprout. Your feedback let us know that new customers were confused about what we do or what we offer, that our product categories were not in balance any longer,  and our homepage was becoming increasingly cluttered with many links, items, and anecdotes. Prepared with this information, we began the transformation from our old, cluttered design to a new, clean, crisp, and professional look that we hope you will enjoy.


When you visit the new site, the first thing you will notice is the new ChinaSprout logo. Still carrying the characteristics of our old logo (a leaf, friendly colors and a playful font), the new logo is more legible, more mature, yet very fresh and highly dynamic. We believe it is an honorable successor and will remain with us for a long time to come.

 

Along with the redesign of the logo came the inspiration for the redesign of the website. You will immediately notice there is a certain "creative tension" between the logo and the website resulting in a fresh color and layout scheme that is still bound by our earthen pastel-toned colors, and bordered by heaven (blue/yellow) and earth (orange/brown), the pillars of ancient Chinese philosophy.

Our site is also more user-friendly. Drawing on feedback collected from many of our customers and reviewing the design of other sites on the Internet, we re-organized the site, and created a new dynamic navigation bar on the top and left that will always tell you the category you are currently visiting. We also refined our search engine, and introduced a new gift finder. It can’t get any easier than that! Try it out for yourself. Search for adoption, or monkey or use the gift finder on category, theme, price or age group. Be prepared to spend the next few hours going through all of the exciting products that we feature.

We’ve kept some of the popular features of the old site, while adding a few new features into the mix. All of our registered members still have their profile with us and the entire sign-in and registration process is a lot simpler. Now you only need to use your email and password to sign in. Once you are signed-in, you can take advantage of some of our new features. Your profile now allows you to manage your personal wishlist items, you can create a notification to alert you when a product is back in stock, and you can easily manage your newsletter subscriptions. We have even added a feature so you can make the fonts larger and add more contrast to the website, if you wish to do so! We plan on adding a lot more features so stay tuned and sign-up if you haven’t already done so.

Last, but not least, the community section is popular as ever, with hundreds of entries in the discussion forums, many exciting China-related stories, news items and, of course, the most comprehensive China-related television programming guide available anywhere, researched and compiled by Kirby, an adoptive parent. So visit our community section if you haven't been there for a while and enjoy all of the new content.

I hope you have enjoyed this overview of our new design. We look forward to receiving your feedback on how we can improve the site even further and your opinion of the design. Over time, we will continue to add new features to and will introduce them in our upcoming newsletters right here at ChinaSprout.

Finally, I'd like to take this opportunity to thank all of you for your continued support over the years - it has been my great pleasure and joy to serve such an open-hearted and multi-cultural community. Xiexie and Xin Nian Kuai Le!

Xiaoning Wang