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

Share This

Need to order some champagne for a special occassion? Do you want a fabulous online selection of champagne, sparkling wines, fine wines and spirits at competitive prices? Of course you do!

SPA Fine Champagne Ltd, Bath, is a new and dynamic family run company headed by Andy Russell and his two sons Stephen and Phillip.  Andy Russell says: “Our objective is to offer champagne and sparkling wines, fine wines and spirits at competitive prices without compromising the service to our customers.”

Andy approached the web design team at Deckchair to design and produce an ecommerce website that would give his exclusive customers an easy way to order online.

The website has been designed using SPA Fine Champagne’s existing branding, it has an intuative navigation and search feature making the products easy to browse, view and order. The website also features a full content management system which means that the products, catagories and text can all be updated by the SPA team.

Andy gave Deckchair this testimonial: “Deckchair was recommended to me by a personal friend and right from the start of our relationship with Ollie and his team I found them easy and a pleasure to work with. I am a technophobe but Ollie managed to build us a fantastic and usable website, on time and on budget, that even I can use. I will without doubt recommend him to you and will be using him again to build other websites in the near future“.

If you are thinking of setting up an ecommerce business and you would like some advice or guidance give us a call or pop by for a cup of tea!

Toni

Share This

Top SEO tip No.5 – Google Analytics

Once you have designed and optimised your website, you need to check your stats regularly to see how well it is working for you. You can then make educated adjustments to your web design or page content.

Sign up to Google Analytics (It’s free) and you will be able to track visitors in intricate detail from where they enter the site to where they are exiting, which pages they are viewing, how long they are on the website. Also, where your traffic is coming from ie referred websites or search engines.

You can set up ‘goals’ on your website so that you can track conversions. For example if you want to know how many visitors make it to a certain page but drop out before they actually buy the product, this is very easy to do. All this and much more, so give it a try!

That’s all the tips for this week folks, have a good weekend!

Toni

Share This

Top SEO tip No.3 – Title tags

Once you have written the relevant content for your website (See yesterday’s blog), it is now very important that your Title tags are written correctly and you are making the best use of them.

Your title tag is the heading of each web page that appears at the top of your screen. It is very important that you optimise these by describing the key phrase for that page as well as including your company name. For example a web page describing pink bananas sold by Bananarma Ltd in Bristol should read:

Pink Bananas Bristol – Bananarma Ltd – bespoke bananas Bristol

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip

Toni

Share This

Top SEO tip No.2 - Content and Key phrases

I’m sure no one will disagree with me that Content is still King in Search Engine Optimisation terms. When writing the content or copy for your website you need to keep the focus on your target audience. What are the phrases that your potential customers are using in the search engines?

Spend a little time using a tool like wordtraker and you will see not only what key phrases people are using but also how many other websites are competing for them. (It even has a free trial to get you started!). When you have found your niche key phrases, take the time to write a separate piece of copy that focuses on each one and turn them into separate pages of content for your website.

This is the best way to build up good, relevant content for your website that focuses on what your target market is searching for.

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip!

Toni

Share This

Over the space of this week I will post a series of blogs containing some top SEO tips that I hope will be of some use to you, particularly if you are just starting out. So here goes with the first one:

Top SEO tip No. 1 – Domain Name

If you are about to choose the domain name for your business website, then bear in mind that Google will favour a keyword rich domain name. What I mean by this is;
 If your company sells green widgets in Bristol, you will be better off choosing the domain name www.greenwidgetsinbristol.com as opposed to your company name.

This of course is only one factor in your overall SEO strategy and this one aspect alone will not give your website first page Google listings for those keywords. It can, however give you an advantage over your competitors who have a less descriptive domain name.

Join me tomorrow for your next top SEO tip!

Toni

Share This

Happy New Year to you all! Hope you all had a fun time.

As always at the start of a new year, it is a time for reflection, taking stock and starting afresh with new ideas. I am hoping that 2008 will bring new exciting challenges and adventures for the Deckchair team. One of the main things on our ‘TO DO List’ is to redesign our blog. It is rather uninspiring to look at and it is a bit shameful that it has taken us 6 months to get round to thinking about it.

There are lots of things I think we should include aside from the obvious much needed asthetic redesign. And of course it goes without saying that I would be most grateful for any advice or suggestions from any of you:

1. Add in the Dofollow plugin as Randa Clay mentions in her I follow blog. It will give more incentive to visitors to leave comments as the search engines will recognise the link.
2. Make it more obvious which of the Deckchair team is writing each post by adding an author picture at the top of the post. (might have to do a bit of arm twisting on that one, designers are so shy!)
3. Add a community panel (if that is what it is called?) so that recent visitors and commentors can be seen and can see each other. As on Paul Enderson’s blog Reflections.
4. Add a counter that clocks the number of times each blog post is viewed. This is mainly for my benefit as I don’t get many comments at the moment and it will make me feel better if I see that lots of people have at least looked at it.
5. Add a ‘popular articles’ list down the side of the blog to make it easier for people to get to the good stuff.
6. Add the similar posts plugin as suggested in David Airey’s blog Top 5 essential wordpress plugins.
7. Make it easier to subscribe to the blog.
8. Some of these plugins look interesting on Elliot Swan’s wordpress plugins worth having blog. But still working my way through understanding what most of them are!
9. Search function of some sort to help people find what they are looking for.

I am sure that this list will grow and change as we start the makeover process so watch this space! Again, if you have any useful tips or suggestions we would be most grateful

Toni

Share This

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

Share This

According to a BBC report, shoppers in the UK will spend £200m a day on the internet in the run up to Christmas; with the total holiday spend likely to hit £4bn. This Year’s online spend is set to be 50% more than last Christmas.

People are more comfortable now than they have been with the idea of ordering on line. More and more businesses have set up ecommerce websites and are cashing in on this new buying trend. However, there are still weak areas that prevent the ecommerce businesses from achieving their full potential. The main issue that I want to discuss in this blog is:

Unpredictable Delivery

It is simply not convenient to have a package delivered at an unannounced or unpredictable time. Delivering goods to people’s homes during office hours whilst they are at work just doesn’t make sense.

I have had plenty of these little notes through my door saying: “Sorry we missed you…”. You then have to wait 48 hours for the package to get back to the depot before you can retrieve it. This not only delays getting your shopping but you then have to drive there yourself to pick it up. Great! That hardly takes the stress out of the shopping experience does it?

Another annoying delivery trick is when a courier company just leaves the package on your doorstep for all to see. If it hasn’t been stolen by the time you get home from work it has probably been damaged by torrential rain.

Some ecommerce websites allow you to put special instructions on your delivery details when you order which is certainly on the way to being helpful. This gives you the chance to specify a trusted neighbour to take it for you or a safe secret place where they can leave it. But it is still not ideal.

My delivery choice wish list

How about ecommerce websites giving a full range of delivery options? People like choice, it makes them feel like they have a say in the process. The range of options could look like this:

1. Free delivery – arrives 2–4 days
2. Standard delivery – arrives 1-2 days
3. Express delivery – arrives next day
4. Super Delivery – Arrives within a specified time slot of customer’s choice.
5. Special Evening delivery – Arrives after 7pm at night.
6. Weekend Delivery – Arrives at a specified time on the weekend.
7. Flying carpet delivery – Arrives at exactly the moment the customer specifies.

Well, if you had this many options for delivery you would certainly be spoiled for choice.

I have covered many ecommerce web design and business issues in these previous articles:

Types of Successful Ecommerce websites

Ecommerce peeves and must haves - Boost those conversion rates.

Anyone got any other ecommerce delivery solution ideas out there? Anyone want to rant about ecommerce delivery issues?

Toni

Share This

The short answer to this question is NO, they certainly shouldn’t! For a web or graphic designer there are always going to be deadlines. They are a part of any brief; a client always has a timescale in mind. The question is whether the client’s idea of a realistic timescale matches the designers and their workload. No good designer will take on a job where the quality of the design would be compromised just to meet an unrealistic deadline. It is just not worth his/her reputation.

Project Management

A good designer will, however, be able to meet a tight deadline with effective management of the project.  To manage a design project a designer needs to be aware of the following:

1. How long it will take to do each particular part of the design and how that will fit in with the internal scheduling of all the design projects that are current.

2. How long will any outsourced parts of the design take? For example a print job will be heavily reliant on the printer’s schedule so this will need to be checked and factored in.

3. How much of the project will rely on the client? – for example if the client is required to supply copy for the website design, they will need to be made aware of when it is needed and the consequence of that deadline being missed.

4. If the design project is for a larger company that will require multiple sign offs for approval it is probably worth allowing a little more time for this in the schedule.

5. For very large projects where there are many parts or stages to the design it is always worth allowing extra time for the inevitable changes or additions. These will often happen as the project moves forward however meticulously it has been planned out.

Timeline

A very effective way to ensure that the project is managed properly is for the designer to agree a timeline with the client before work begins; this can be done as part of the contract. The timeline should include:

1. Production deadlines

2. Approval deadlines

3. Deadlines for the supply of content including copy and images from the client.

4. Testing deadlines

5. Launch/delivery dates.

Be sure that the client is aware of the importance of the timeline and how each milestone deadline that is not met will affect the overall project.

Communication

If the project management and the timeline are executed properly there will be little reason for a project to run over time. It is very important, however, that the communication between the designer and the client is good. It means that any hiccups or delays can be resolved straight away; everyone is in the loop.

Respect the deadline

If the timescale is very tight and the designer has any doubts that the deadline would not be met then he should not attempt to take the job on. Sometimes in this situation the client has an unrealistic idea of how long a project will take and if they have not left themselves enough time to complete it then the designer would be wise to steer well clear and keep his reputation intact.

It is always possible to ask if a deadline can be moved before a project starts. But the designer will loose the respect of the client if he suddenly asks for an extension halfway through the project. Deadlines must be respected at all costs and should never jeopardise the quality of the design work or the reputation of the client.

Toni

Related articles:

Are we there yet? Meet your design deadline

The Tao of deadlines

Deadlines kill inspiration

Share This