WEBSITES - Oxford Fashion Week

The likely objectives for the website presence for Oxford Fashion Week may be to;
Establish the event within the fashion and arts industry
To sell tickets to the public ensuring each show is a sell out and the venues are full to capacity
To educate the public about Oxford Fashion Week.

Oxford Fashion Weeks website seems very efficient and relatively easy to navigate. Visually, the home page is very attractive, it is modern and simple with large photographs displayed as backgrounds. The theme of the website is in keeping with the event itself, being very fashion forward and high end. The logo for Oxford Fashion Week is displayed on each page, it is again in very simple, a black box with Oxford Fashion Week and the dates written in white.

The homepage consists of a beautiful photo as the background and then very simply on the left hand side is the navigation box to the other pages. These tabs consist of; Latest, 2011, Events, Gallery, Social and Contact. Clicking on ‘latest’ takes you directly to the official blog, this is very clever as at first you don’t notice and it appears you are reading information about the event, this is a good way to feed information to the reader. The blog is very well constructed and is kept up to date. Clicking on ‘2011’ gives you the options of sub categories; these consist of About, The Team, Partners, Designers, Models & Press. The About page states Oxford Fashion Weeks Mission. This is important for a new company as it enables readers to understand what the event is about. There is also information on past OFW participants and a history of the event. This information is displayed in a very simple way with the layout consisting just of text and a lot of it. This is likely to put some people of reading down the page and may repulse them from the website. The Team is literally list the categories of the event with the people would worked within each category listed underneath. This is again very plain but it is simple and so easy to read. On The Partners page, the logo of each sponsor or partner is listed, there is no other information on this page. Both The Designers and The Models pages are very similar to the previous pages, with the categories listed and the names of the designers or of the models listed underneath the relevant category. Aesthetically this is not the most pleasing visual imagery, it is very bland and after looking at several pages of lists I feel this could detract from the high-end value the website it aiming to portray. The next tab The Press is so plain, it consists of one heading like ‘Calling all Press’ and then ‘For more information please email Charlotte Bushnell, OFW Press Director
Charlotte.Bushnell@oxfordfashionweek.com’. This content is not worthy of a whole web page, it may be better if this was somehow integrated into another section.

The next link is the Events tab. On clicking this you are given several options, the first being Tickets & Schedule. Here you can purchase tickets, this is very simple and the event and price are displayed quite clearly. You are then presented with a 4 page virtual catalogue, this has a front cover with a large photo on, the second and third pages list the schedule and the last has the logos of the sponsorship. To the right of the catalogue is an archive of related virtual brochures, from London Fashion Week schedule to the Prada selection catalogue. This interactive part of the website is key in keeping a readers attention and works very well.

Under this tab are all the separate events. By licking on any one of these you will be shown, in rather a large ammount of text, the information for that event. What it is called, where and when it is, what it consists of and who the participants are.

There is also a Gallery page, here there is the option to view the 2009 and 2010 show aswell as a designers collection. This is a good way on showing the public what Oxford Fashion Week is as they are able to see for themselves what it is about, rather than just being told. The photographs are of the highest quality and represent Oxford Fashion Week in the highest of lights.

The social page gives you the option to follow Oxford Fashion Week on Facebook, twitter, Flickr and to follow the official blog. All of these social marketing tools are a great way to communicate and involve the public in an event. The level of customer interaction here is very high quality and well devised.

The final page is the contact page, this is a short page with several of the main producers email addresses. It is again very simple and not much description or visuals are present.
The quality of the information on the Oxford Fashion Week website is great, there is plenty of it, however it is not displayed in an appealing way. Great chunks of text are not easy or appealing to read and this should be altered to make it more user and reader friendly.