Design & Development Strategy

Gandhara Street

The home of lifestyle shopping and activities in Sri Lanka. Stratford Avenue is revered throughout the Sri Lanka for its wealth of elegant stores, exclusive brands, designer fashion, lifestyle stores and exquisite cuisine options.

Strategy
Customer Experience
Design
UI/UX Design, Prototyping & Optimisation
Client
Gandhara Street

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Project Overview

Gandhara Street is the brainchild of Shahili Gomes from Gandhara Store in Stratford Avenue. Gandhara Street concept was formed in order to convert the highly acclaimed Stratford Avenue to a lifestyle and shopping destination.

Shahili and Gandhara partnered with Sketch to create a digital experience for Gandhara Street that would comprise of an online directory for all businesses operating in Stratford Avenue, an event engine to showcase what’s happening in the street and a content blog to boost the organic findability of these businesses on Google.

Challenge

Our Approach

The challenges & our approach

Establish Gandhara Street as a must visit shopping street for local and tourists in Sri Lanka

Structured the website to include an online directory of the 30+ stores on Stratford Avenue, and organized them in to experience categories to improve user experience

Create a one stop digital portal to access all information related to the stores on Stratford Avenue

Developed a full fledge online directory with all information pertaining to the stores. This included overview about the location, opening times, contact numbers and links, social links and images of the location and atmosphere.

Create a mechanism to show the liveliness of the Gandhara Street stores

Developed an event engine that would give an outlet for all street vendors to showcase their events in one place. This event calendar comprised of the date, time and venue along with map links for users to easily view the event location on Google Maps.

Achieve high SEO rankings for stores and the Street portal alike

The highest priority was to ensure the individual stores came up on the top pages of Google search results. This was facilitated through the structuring of the content, high speed experience and Schema implementation to define page types along with their attributes effectively. A content blog was also incorporated to drive SEO value through high quality blogging.