Hi Everybody. It has been ages since I posted here, and I need a little help with something. Based on this community's highly-esteemed and advanced state of interweb addiction, I would greatly appreciate your suggestions.

My company is upgrading our website, and I have been asked to recommend any good corporate sites to steal ideas from. It is a small/medium scale retail chain and I need suggestions. What websites do you think have a really cool design or a great modern look?

Please post links. I would like to avoid the all flash design, since we need the ability for novices to easily update the content from all of our satellite locations. Please, no inappropriate links or other such silliness in this thread.

Thanks for your help!

They haven't considered letting a professional make the website? That could be a good investment considering that most people judge a corporation buy its public appearance and you can't get much more public than on a website.
A professional could make you a website suited for your corporation and not just one pieced together from other websites.

What Impi said.

I'd be willing to do it, have your boss contact me at pwizard[at]gmail.com if interested.

what's the current site look like?

We do have a small IT department guys, with some highly qualified individuals on staff. The problem is that IT folks are often not in tune with our business model, nor are they always focused on the impression we want to give our customers. Our last website was put together by a respected professional agency we had hired, but the result was a very fancy, flash-based, multimedia-heavy, very user-UNfriendly site, for which we received a lot of criticism. Sometimes geeks (yours truly included) are only into bells and whistles, animations and stuff, and they can be distracted from the theme and basic objectives.

The reason my superiors asked for my opinion, is that I hold an upper-level sales management position, and unlike the "official" IT people here, I am aware of the whole picture of our business, and I tend not to be as easily distracted by all the kewl new flash-but often useless-stuff out there..

I am hesitant to tell you the business or direct you to the old site, because right now I am only looking for ideas. I don't want anybody to start up with "here's what I would do", "I can do this for you", or "hire me and I will make your customers' computer screens pull their money out of thar noses and make you all bazillionaires!!".

What I need right now are some examples of things you have seen recently that you thought were cool or interesting, from a design sense. I will deal with the content later.

Thanks in advance for the links!

FF

But we need to know the scale, audience and identity of the business in order to point you towards relevant design ideas.

I can list dozens of sites that are done really well but they probably won't be of any use to you since design is greatly dependent on purpose.

Well, since we're not in upper-level management, we don't really know what kind of website a retail chain would need. Give us some specific requirements. I wrote a simple intranet website for my base, so I may be able to help.



Sometimes, perhaps. But it seems to me that most geeks are into functionality more than looks or (especially) ease of use. E.g., I refuse to let people use frontpage with my site, and all the images are small and fast-loading. Strict functionality.