Many more photos on Tasteologie and the Daily Mail Online

Of particular note, a large use of fresh (some might say Asda) green and a very architectural girder or two that run through the space.

Fascia with entrance 'you are here' graphics and plant barrow to the right.

Interior with the big green girder

'Market fresh' produce with ubiquitous hand written blackboard graphics, one day someone will actually write these kind of things by hand

Salad bar close up

Spotted on LSN Global and Popsop and Fitch

Gone is the enormous site map in the footer replaced with a neater version. Navigation is cleaner and the ‘value’ bright green is replaced with a more elegant textured brown and olive green.

In the details of particular note are the areas on the introductory slideshow where icons give the viewer the option to click and see more information. In the bricks and mortar world, this ‘getting to know the store’ time is called a decompression zone, here on a website this type of interaction as well as the other tabbed layouts beneath the slideshow create a lot of interest on the home page. Also of note is that these longer home pages look good on a vertical iPad. Starting to see more websites that make better use of the lower half of a vertical screen.

For posterity, below is the old Waitrose website. Here’s the new one www.waitrose.com

More images below, including Mel Elliot’s brilliant colouring wall, Peter Ibreugger’s fab moustache mugs, the super cool WORK IT girls making their wall and the illustrator phoebe Eason painting her Bird wall.

If I wasn’t a country bumpkin I’d be there filling my golden shopping basket with goods, various.

Details of how to get there on the Supermarket Sarah blog

Hover over the products to see what’s still available and what’s sold. Click the browse button to see a different catalogue view.

Take a look for yourself. Supermarket Sarah.

Originally from the very excellent Design Milk

As many businesses look to embrace social media at least Asda have plunged in with both feet, whilst others prevaricate; mainly I suspect because they don’t know what they’re buying and/or don’t believe it has a part to play in their organisation. I’m pretty certain that (based on the kind of work we’re doing, more than anything else) that it will be the norm for businesses to have a social media presence of some description and more importantly that the people who run this side of marketing are employees who can be authentic about their brand rather than external agencies. Patterns of employment will also have to change. There’s no point having an online presence that clocks off at 5 o’clock.

At least Asda have a catchment audience in their own employees but many organisations seem to think that user generated content (UGC) will play  large part in their social media strategy. This seems a rather lazy way out and flawed. After all if you’ve got Facebook, MySpace, Twitter etc why would you go on a forum hosted by any business, it would have to be truly excellent in its own right. Organisations have to come to customers wherever they are, that’s always been the case in retail, and still the case online. Sainsbury’s forum for instance has as of today, 65,691 members but only 134 posts this month, there’s too many other things out there that are better and less brand led.

Another interesting part of Asda’s communication to their employees is that they’ve produced a poster (including a big brother mouse as a bomb, complete with fuse!) which while being rather foreboding at least shows they understand the perils of opening themselved up to the world online.

The posters, watch out for the interweb now …

Also worth looking at Asda on twitter and their YouTube channel, SYMtv (that’s Saving You Money tv)

And also worth looking at how Whole Foods run their whole online presence, as always the US is doing it better:

Whole Foods on twitter

Whole Foods Blog