Not a total wash out!

I have written before about my opinions on using URL shortening to help in real world situations where space is at a premium. I have now had the chance to put it into practice, but not quite in the way I originally intended. My idea was to use customised URL shortening to generate a memorable URL that could be put on a ‘car for sale’ poster that would help potential buyers to remember one simple address (such as tr.im/corsa) and find out the details online. This time I used the same principle but for a slightly different purpose.

The advert

I wanted to sell a washing machine which came as part of our house purchase last year, but we had never used. The local paper was offering text adverts for a pound, but previous experience told me that four lines of text wasn’t enough and people will call with questions and want to view and other such inconveniences. So I decided to put a customised shortened URL into the advert so that I could provide as much information as I wanted up front, and cut down on the questions and time wasters.

The design

This didn’t take very long. I just wanted a one pager that made the washing machine look as good as possible and made it nice and clear just how much we wanted and how to get in touch. After that I had some extra information from the manual such as dimensions and wash cycle, along with some photos that Laura had taken of the machine. I laid out what I wanted in one sketch, and then went into Photoshop.

I knew that I wanted a water based, but fresh looking colour scheme to compliment the big white photo of the washing machine that was going to sit on the right of the layout. I choose yellow to focus users on the price and the call to action with a darker colour for the block to promote the free manual and hoses. I tweaked the position of the price sticker and the hose and manual block once everything was in, and in the end I decided to leave my logo out of the footer, not least because it wouldn’t fit in with the colour scheme.

The final page

So here is the final page – sketched, laid out and built over an evening – that sat behind the shortened URL. By the way my mobile number doesn’t really have nine zeros in it!

Result

It was suprising how many people visited the page over the weekend after the paper was printed. As the screenshot to the right shows I had 117 unique page views (second row down) by Sunday night, by which time I had had nearly a dozen phone calls. Needless to say I sold it pretty quickly.