Web Review: www.aaronbasha.com

By Gil Galanti

With a clientele of celebrities such as Britney Spears and Catherine Zeta Jones, the Aaron Basha boutique is famous for its baby shoe and ladybug charms. Aaron Basha has been a leading brand ever since its founder began designing and retailing jewelry in the 1950’s. Since 2001, it also runs its own website at www.aaronbasha.com and apart from very few glitches, it is spectacular.

 

Not forgetting the “skip animation” option, the site uses a cheerful splash-screen animation of cute characters turning into jewels.

Eight high quality images linking to the company’s most popular items take most of the homepage span. Clicking these images launches larger interactive images allowing pointing at and seeing their prices. It’s a nice feature, but I find it somewhat frustrating that clicking the priced item does not take me any further. What if I would like to buy it? Conveniently, however, the main menu offers the entire website catalog, containing the jewelry and branded diamonds.

Aaronbasha.com ship their goods internationally, but encourage visitors to find an “Authorized Jeweler” nearby before contacting them for their preferred item. That’s right. Aaronbasha.com has no shopping cart embedded in its system and is actually a well made digital brochure.

Nevertheless, aaronbasha.com is a fine example of a company’s site in its brochure stage, which can still be based on a database-driven system. Unlike static websites, where all the pages are completely built in advance, most pages of database-driven sites are created on the fly, based on database information. These sites are faster to update and thus, draw more returning visitors.

The marketing approach of aaronbasha.com can be described as “daring”. Last August it announced its own presidential ballot, counting the number of customers buying democratic donkey charms and cufflinks vs. republican elephants.

I am quite impressed. Just days before the elections, we still don’t know if it’s going to be Bush or Kerry, but we do know at least one winner of the world’s greatest democratic celebration of 2004.

IDEX Website Review is an objective evaluation, expressing clear and balanced opinions on retail diamond and jewelry websites. All articles published in this review are solely under IDEX’s editorial control and are not commercially influenced.

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