By Kapil Ohri
Digital

'You' can redesign Indiatimes Shopping portal

The Internet company is asking consumers or designers to recreate Shopping.Indiatimes.com homepage, product description and mobile category pages of the website

Indiatimes.com has decided to involve consumers in the redesign process of its shopping site, Shopping.Indiatimes.com.

The company is asking consumers or designers to recreate the homepage of Shopping.Indiatimes.com, as well as the product description and mobile category pages of the website. "The logo of the online shopping site is not open for redesign," clarifies an Indiatimes spokesperson.

'You' can redesign Indiatimes Shopping portal
To redesign, consumers are required to participate in a contest, named Website redesign pitch challenge, which the portal has initiated in partnership with Microsoft and The Webby Award.

Participants have to follow a design brief available at MSDesignchallenge.com and keep other considerations in mind while redesigning the website. For instance, the brief states that the designed web pages should have spaces for promotions (banner ads, special offers and others) and also have tabs for sign-ups, subscriptions to offers, newsletters and loyalty programmes.

'You' can redesign Indiatimes Shopping portal
The redesign exercise of Shopping.Indiatimes.com is not just a marketing activity. "The design solutions offered by the users will be actually implemented. We will consider or utilise top design entries and either implement complete design suggestions submitted by participants or may incorporate a few elements of their designs in the revamped avatar of the site," the spokesperson says.

He adds, "The contest will complement the efforts of our in-house design team, which is already working on Shopping.Indiatimes.com redesign. The crowd sourcing effort will help us to incorporate design elements which our in-house design team may miss."

The horizontal portal is using online banner and print advertisements to promote and invite participants to the contest.

Incidentally, another horizontal portal, Yahoo!, also engaged consumers in the creation of property.

Though Yahoo.in did not involve consumers in the site revamp process, it carried out an exciting contest called Yodel Studio in October 2009, in which Internet users were allowed to sing and record the Yahoo! signature tune and submit it on a microsite, Yodelstudio.Yahoo.com.

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