Design on the mind

What better way to illustrate to you what we can do for your business than to show you a case study of an ecommerce website that we designed and built for a client recently:

The Client

Chew Valley Trees are a long established nursery who specialise in hardy, native and ornamental trees, shrubs, hedging and fruit trees. They are situated at the bottom of the Mendip hills and their 18 acre nursery continues to grow both in size and product range. Their plants have featured at major national venues such as the Chelsea Flower Show, Hampton Court Palace and Westonbirt International Festival of Gardens. Professional and amateur gardeners alike have benefited from their helpful service and knowledgeable advice.

The Challenge

Chew Valley trees needed to reach a wider UK audience in order to expand their selling power. Their existing website was only a single page that wasn’t able to give any idea of the range and variety of plants and trees that they sell. It was also not optimised for the search engines and therefore not being found by a wide enough audience.

The solution

Deckchair quickly produced some initial designs for a full ecommerce website and after discussions with the Chew Valley team, started to build the website. The overall design and layout is appealing to the market sector with plenty of pictures, descriptions and tips. The navigation is intuitive and allows the customer to browse the product categories to easily find what they need, before proceeding to a secure payment system to buy the products.

The Chew Valley team has the ability to update the products, pictures and descriptions easily through a simple admin system. This enables them to add new products themselves and keep the website fresh and up to date. A news section allows them to add interesting and topical information making the website a valuable resource in the gardening and landscaping sector. It encourages their customers to return to the website on a regular basis.

Of course the website was built from the ground up to be search engine friendly and is optimized for niche key phrases such as:
Ornamental trees
Native tree shop
Trees online

They are averaging 150 hits a day and 78% of those are coming through google. The conversion rates from these visitors are very good and improving month on month.

The Result

As a direct result of their new website and it’s search engine positions, Chew Valley Trees is now a flourishing online business and their sales figures have soared. Not only are they reaching a UK wide audience through the website but the company profile has been raised and has increased the number of people visiting the nursery too.

Testimonial

“We could not have been happier with the level of service received. The genuinely friendly approach and sympathetic understanding of what we were trying to achieve were professionally translated into a website that we are delighted with. Nothing was too much trouble.”
Julia Scarth, Owner, Chew Valley Trees.

Are you a business owner who wants to take your business online with an ecommerce website? Give us a call we are happy to talk to you about your options and we can give our expert impartial advice on the best strategy for your company

Toni

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Castle School in Thornbury, Bristol approached the web design team at Deckchair to design and build a new school website. They wanted to have complete control over the content of the website and the ability to change and update the copy on any page. We have given them exactly that; a fully content managed (updateable by them) website built using Wordpress. It has intuitive navigation, search function, multiple sections and news and events calendar.

It has created a single point of information for Staff, parents and pupils. Files, letters and information can be downloaded from the website very easily. For example parents can download the latest ‘letters home’ and view homework timetables. (Sorry kids, no getting out of your maths homework now!)

Staff can upload images and photographs to a website called Flickr which will automatically display the images as a slideshow on the school website.

Are you a school or college in or near Bristol? Can we help you with your website to give you full control over your content? Call us anytime for a chat and some impartial advice.

Toni

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Blogging has become a very popular way to communicate with your audience and to keep content fresh on a website. Wordpress would be many people’s choice of platform for a blog, as it is well designed and certainly very flexible. It has been said that blog websites can ‘all look the same’, but it is very easy to make them look different with the hundreds of wordpress themes available and a bit of personalisation. In fact a lot of people now have turned their website into their blog and combined the two. We are in the process of doing this with our site and hope to gain many benefits.

Although Wordpress was launched originally as a blogging tool, many people are now using it to build non blog websites. Because of its lean code, expandability through a multitude of available plugins and great backend administration area, it has become a versatile platform from which to build a fully content managed site. Unlike other CMS systems which are bloated and maybe too full featured (Joomla is good, but guilty of this), the simple nature of Wordpress allows designers to expand from an uncluttered base and go as far as you want with features and design.

Here is a great example of a Wordpress site: David Airey.

Do you use wordpress? What limitations have you found with using it to build non blog websites? Are there other systems you prefer to use? It would be great to hear others thoughts on this.

Ollie

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We have designed a few websites for schools in and around Bristol in the last year and have just launched our latest project; the new website for Colston’s Girls’ School.

Colston’s approached us at Deckchair to design an up-to-date and fresh website using the Colston’s colours and style. They wanted the website to become a resource for students, staff, parents, govenors and prospective parents and students. They also needed the website to be updateable by their staff, include an ecommerce shop and many other features.

The website features:

• A bespoke content management system – allowing staff to update all areas of the website themselves and upload information and pdf files easily.
• Ecommerce shop to sell uniform, sports kit and stationery.
• ‘Letter to home’ feature, allowing letters to be directly sent to parents from the website.
• A-Z index of content and site map.
• Slide show of images on the home page created in Flash.
• Professional photography session including the school buildings, lessons, students, staff portraits and more to produce quality pictures for the website and printed materials.
• Training sessions and support for the staff to use the content management system.

 If you need any advice or help with content management systems or you are wondering if a system like this would benefit your business then give us a call for a chat or pop in for a cup of tea if you are local.

Toni

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With a website’s potential to be so dynamic, it’s often a good idea to have a content management system, which allows non-technical staff, with a little bit of training, to update certain areas of a site. This means potentially you can update your website everyday, adding news stories, uploading a photo or changing product details without having to contact the web developer.

Now this is sounds all fine and dandy at the planning stage or when the site is being put together, but there are big implications for the site owners once the website is complete. Who is going to do the updates? How are you going to ensure the quality of the content? Who is responsible? Once the site has been handed over these are now an internal issue.

Some companies embrace their new content management systems; the site grows and becomes a great, up-to-date resource for customers and internal staff. This relies on one or a few members of staff dedicating time to the site on a regular basis, making sure they integrate it into their busy work schedules and the business or organisation will soon reap the benefits.

When getting a new site developed with a content management system make sure you have the resources to handle the site, if you don’t it may become a thorn in your side. If you gain control of your website and maintain the content, it can become one of the most important parts of your business.

We can help you with a complete web solution, ongoing strategy and the training your staff will need to maintain the site.

Ollie

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Generally in life I think it can be safely said that ‘You get what you pay for’. This of course applies to website design too. We recently had a company director from the local area approach us needing a website. After an initial conversation with him about his business and his requirements it became clear that he needed a website that he could easily maintain and update himself. A content management system would enable him to do just that; through a secure admin area, he would be able to upload images of his products, change the details, prices, content and look of the website whenever he wanted to.

We spent a bit of time writing a detailed outline for the project with a full design brief and detailed itemized quote. The outline included every aspect of the web design including ideas for the content, navigation, strategies for search engine optimisation and of course, the bespoke content management system.

He was thrilled with the proposal and said he would call the next day to get us started on the project. The next day he did call, but he said that he didn’t want us to design his website anymore because he had found another company who could build him a website for a fraction of the cost.

This was a definite case of someone who didn’t understand about the technicalities of building a website and the importance of getting each factor absolutely right.  The company that he spoke of are very good at churning out cheap websites which all look very similar (and awful if I may say so) due to the fact that they are built from templates. There is little thought or consideration for the user, seo (Search engine optimisation), the market sector or the target audience. He had been completely swayed on price and how much ‘he could save’.

When are people like this going to realize the value of their website? A website is a living, breathing advertisement/brochure for your business; it is accessible by millions of potential customers through the World Wide Web, it is probably your most valuable marketing tool. Surely it makes sense to get it designed by an experienced, professional web design company who will ensure that you are presenting the right image of your business and actually reaching your target audience.

So what had this gentleman actually ‘saved’, well he may have saved a bit of money in the short term, but really it is a false economy and I guarantee he will have lost out to his competitors in the long term. He was not going to get a content management system or an original web design; as I said in the beginning: ‘You get what you pay for!’

At Deckchair we build all of our websites around the needs of our clients. We design them from the ground up with the search engines in mind and we don’t use templates. The result is a bespoke and original web design with clear, easy navigation that holds the attention of the user and can be found easily on the search engines. We will advise you on the best design and web marketing strategies for your company. We will ensure that you get quality traffic and you stay ahead of your competitors.

Toni

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