Krafthaus

What we learned: Building and growing an online design e-commerce marketplace in Australia

paperlust wedding invitation set sample

Wow what a year it has been for us at Krafthaus, this year has taken us in an entirely new direction in the digital landscape. In early 2015 we set out creating our new online product start-up, it’s called Paperlust. Paperlust is is a platform marketplace for wedding invitations, birthday, stationery and invitation marketplace. We looked at the stationery design market in Australia and noticed the lack of creativity in the current designs that were out there, with the common theme being under designed clip art, and overly tacky in nature. A lot of the quality design in the Australian Read more…

Eight simple ingredients for the perfect website

Eight simple ingredients for the perfect website

  So you need some web design done for your Melbourne-based business? Well you probably want to talk to a digital agency like Krafthaus, but what are the elements that make up good web design? We have put together a list of eight simple ingredients for a modern, sleek website that will command attention and draw engagement.   1. Good Content This is the single most important core aspect of a good website today. Content and what they are going to put on their website is almost at the back of the mind for a lot of clients when they come Read more…

What we learned in our first 12 months – lessons for startups

What we learned in our first 12 months – lessons for startups

I’m going to go away from our usual format here of talking about tech advances and digital trends to talk a little about our business and the first 12 months of our operation. Why? Well because it is our first birthday today, Krafthaus officially opened for business one year ago today. We have grown rapidly (from four people involved initially to nine today, and soon to be thirteen) and while this presents its challenges we were lucky to have a solid business background, so most of the financial stuff came fairly easily to us. The bigger challenges came in setting Read more…

Krafthaus’s top ten digital trends for 2013

Krafthaus’s top ten digital trends for 2013

OK, as a number of the projects we have been working on here are ‘hush hush’ we can’t share them with you yet. So instead I thought I would share our ‘top ten’ digital trends of 2013. Hopefully in the New Year we will be able to share some of the things we have been working on, a lot of which are based on what we see as the future of digital.

When an App is not an App?

When an App is not an App?

We are working on a digital strategy at the moment for a client (hush hush I’m afraid so no names) and when doing an analysis of their current digital offerings I found that one of their previous campaigns had included an “App”.

User Experience goals and research behavior

User Experience goals and research behavior

The motivation for wanting good web design quite often begins when I client has seen something online that impresses them, quite often one of their competitor sites whom they quietly envy. “We like what was done here”, and “we like the way their site does this” are common phrases you hear. But what is often discovered when we look at these sites is while they may look nice, functionality and User Experience has been overlooked.

Does design actually matter for online sales?

Does design actually matter for online sales?

I recently bought myself an Amazon Kindle. Now originally I wanted to write a blog on how annoying it was that you can’t buy an Kindle Fire in Australia (yes I know you can get it shipped here using one of those re-direct services and hack it, but it loses most of the functionality I wanted: Netflix, HBO, Google Play, Amazon Prime).

Magazines online, the future, the tablet market

Magazines online, the future, the tablet market

Magazine publishers. The hype, the iPad, the excitement. Was this the device their savior into the online publishing realm? Excitement was in the air, Time Magazine and a lot of the bigger publishers spent big to getting their monthly consumer publications converted into an App, to enter the Apple App store.

The shift toward responsive web design

The shift toward responsive web design

The shift towards adaptive and responsive web design displays is becoming more widespread across the internet, but the majority of websites still only use the centre column of the screen real estate, leaving a blank white space either side of the content area wasting valuable space on the first page. Having more space on the first page enables you to present the user as much key information as possible, without overloading. In this article you will find a few examples of the challenges of using the full screen, and free tools and techniques out there to help you achieve responsive Read more…

Use Pinterest to promote your interest

Use Pinterest to promote your interest

Do you want to promote your brand? It’s well worth thinking about the possibilities of the phenomenon that’s taking the online space by storm – Pinterest. A social photo sharing website where users create and manage theme-based image compilations, Pinterest’s popularity is rapidly growing; it’s just been recorded that ‘Pinterest Drives More Traffic to Blogs Than Twitter‘  (according to third-party measurement data). In February, the company that provided data found that a little less than half (48.81%) of all traffic came from Google, followed by Facebook (6.38%), Yahoo (1.61%), StumbleUpon (1.29%) and Bing (1.21%). Pinterest came in sixth at 1.05%, beating Read more…