The site
http://www.forbesaccountants.co.uk/

The design
We wanted a really nice wide open design.  The company logo was the starting point.  We know that in the future content will be added and the site will grow, so the design needed to incorporate the future needs of the business.  We heavily modified a widely available template to produce a really nice, clean, crisp look and feel.  We opted for a simple typography that is easy on the eye, but conveys the message well

The build
This was a very straightforward build for us.  Once the design stage was complete we worked with Mike Smith on the content

Collaboration with Mike Smith – Marketing expert
We worked in conjunction with Mike Smith Consulting on this site, as part of a new exciting business collaboration.  Mike wrote the content, whilst we delivered the framework and site.  Mike is available on a consultancy basis to all of our customers who need help with sales and marketing copy

The Platform
Essentially this is a WordPress site that has been modified to the business need

SEO
SEO is a very important element of the sites design.  Over the next months we will be working quite hard on both the on page and off page SEO

Feature list
- Easily updatable by the client
- Firewall, and other security features
- User data capture on registration and user forms
- Site automatically pushes new content to search engines
- SEO by design

CSS
The typography for the site is pretty simple and easy on the eye.  It was designed for readability, and to keep the users interest

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, XML, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
As per our normal policy, we have secured the site, using a variety of methods.  We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site
Working with the clients
This was a three way process, between Mike Smith Consulting, the client and ourselves.  This collaboration made the build very easy for us

Images and graphics
We sourced all of the licensed photographs for the client, and created all the graphics in house

The site
www.emberjd.com

The design
The design was fairly fluid process with the company. We presented a design which was then bounced back and forth until everyone was happy. This is a pretty typical method for the way we work. We designed the front page buttons in a PSD format which the company can amend the texts or inserted images as they need. This means in the future, the company can make a new graphic for any new products in minutes as required

Typography
We used a sharp defined typography, which allows the headlines to led the user. Within the forms, which are fairly long, we have used very user friendly typography, which is easy on the eye, and easy for users to use and read as they type

The build
We staged the site on our own servers, allowing us to present the new site in real time whilst the old site was still serving pages. This meant that the development could be an open and unhindered process. When the site was signed off, the DNS was swapped, and the site switched over gracefully, with a downtime of about half a day.

The build was in three stages. Firstly we got the look, feel, cosmesis and typography sorted. The second stage was adding the content. The third was testing and the minor administrative mopping up, and the general implementation of SEO across the site

The customers were existing Dreamweaver users, so we developed the forms, the CSS and the JavaScript in Dreamweaver locally, and then amended the site template (CSS and JS calls). The net result is that the customer can cut copy and paste out of their version of Dreamweaver into a “New page” in the back end of the site, knowing things like SpryTabs and SpryValidation will work as expected

This is a really important feature we added for the client – that is being able to have a local Dreamweaver view, and a site view that are pretty similar. This will mean the clients will in the future be able to develop and add complex forms that have SpryValidation themselves. Essentially we have added the necessary scripts and stylesheets into the site template to facilitate this.

The platform
This was based on Wordpress. We have not touched the core, so it is still easily updatable. We have however heavily hacked about a fairly standard template, knocking off the “blog” features that were not needed, leaving a really to use basic user updatable CMS behind. This is a concept that originally the clients were unsure of, but seeing the final results we are sure they are very happy with.

Using Wordpress instead of creating a static site for a small business is a very smart move – It separates the content from the design, and allows clients to have a site that they can keep updated, in real time themselves with ease. Adding deleting and editing pages is pretty much as easy as using your favourite word processing package

SEO
Like all of our sites, we provided on page SEO as standard – We will revisit this in a few months as required. Wordpress, with the addition of the correct plug-ins, lets us provide SEO in a systemic way, almost by design -is is important of any pages the client adds in the future will have a good framework for SEO in place

Feature list
- Multi user lightweight CMS site
- Clients can update content as needed
- Firewall, and other security features
- Complex forms and form handling
- SEO by design

CSS
We spent a lot of time setting up the cascading style sheets (CSS) for this site. This will provide a uniform framework for any additional user content. Typography was something we looked at carefully, designed the typography to convey a professional image, yet be user friendly and in the places where the users interact i.e. the long forms. Within the forms we used a proven easy to read and follow text, especially in the input fields

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
As per usual we have looked at the sites security, and added measures to prevent spam and the usual forms of hacking

We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site

Working with the clients
It was a pleasure to work with these clients, who provided us clear feedback. This enabled the fairly swift completion of the site.

Client testimonial
We desperately needed a complete overhaul of our website, which was over four years old, not very pleasing to the eye and expensive to update. However, we had to make sure that any new site would be user friendly both for us and our clients, easy to make changes to ourselves as we constantly update the site, but above all within a strict budget. We also wanted it rolled out and live as soon as possible as the image we were giving out with the current site wasn’t something we were happy with.

I approached Richard and told him what we needed, he came back very quickly with two options for us, a static site written in Dreamweaver or a Wordpress based site. Not being convinced that a blogging site such as Wordpress would be suitable, Richard talked me through the benefits and this is the route we decided to take.

We gave Richard a few examples of sites we liked the look of, but obviously wanted ours to be unique and not a copy of these. He then went away for a few days while he worked on the template. The whole process was simplified by the fact the site was hosted on their servers, so we could keep an eye on any updates as and when we wanted, rather than waiting for Richard to get back to us. This enabled us to let Richard know what we were/weren’t happy with without wasting valuable time. Once we were happy with this, Richard went to work on the design.

We knew what sort of forms we wanted for customers to complete and I provided Richard of these in the form of rough html forms I had created in Dreamweaver. Richard then tidied these up and amended them to our specifications. Once the content started to go in, things started to move forward quite swiftly.

Once again, we kept going back to Richard with amendments. These were mainly amendments that we’d requested but later changed our mind on, and sometimes even changed our mind again. No matter how many amendments we requested, they were all done very quickly and efficiently.

The transition from our old site to the new one was painless, Richard put a temporary page on the site to advise people we were changing over, and the new site was live in less than a day. All in all, from giving Richard the go ahead to build our site to it going live was just over three weeks.

Throughout the whole process Richard kept us informed of developments and made changes as and when without any fuss. Even after our site had gone live, we decided on more changes and Richard happily did these for us even though it was late on a Saturday night. He then spent time with us going through the back end of the site and the server, showing us how it all worked and how to make amendments, as well as guiding us on the SEO side of things, which is very important to us.

We are completely satisfied with the final website, and even more satisfied with the help and guidance we have received prior to and after the site going live. We would highly recommend Place of Design to anyone in a similar position to ourselves. As we can now develop the site ourselves, this alone will save us hundreds of pounds, let alone the time savings as well now that we don’t have to rely on others to do the updates for us. A thoroughly excellent service all round.

http://www.babysfirstcalendar.com

The build
This was a very intense, but fun build for us.  We delivered this site in just over 48 hours.  We used Wordpress for the Blog, and followed the site template through.  The rest of the site is static HTML & CSS, with a smattering of DHTML, JavaScript and PHP.  This site has a very simple implementation of e-commerce – which is essentially using a PayPal and Google payment buttons.  This is a superb method for sites with one or two products

SEO
We have done a few things to aid SEO in the build.  We will be re-visiting the SEO for the site in the near future
Feature list
- Static HTML front end
- Blog – styles to match the rest of the site
- Simple implementation of e-commerce using PayPal & Google Payment buttons
- Validating contact form using PHP for mailing

CSS
We spent a lot of time setting up the cascading style sheets (CSS) for this site.  This has provided a uniform framework for user content.  Typography was something we looked at carefully.  The two coulomb designs, and the expanding rounded corner boxes are all controlled to some extent with CSS

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, DHTML, XML, AXAX, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
We some time securing the Wordpress side of the site.  We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients
Working with the clients
We worked really closely with the clients.  The clients were a dream to work with – being really organised whilst providing really accurate and speedy feedback

Client testimonial
I had launched my product at The London Baby Show and distributed many flyers; however due to unforeseen circumstances with my previous web coder, I did not have the website to back this up. The visuals of the site had already been created and I needed a professional web designer to make it all work

The communication from start to finish was fantastic, I was kept aware of exactly what was going on throughout. Richard also went above and beyond by adding features to the site to make it more user friendly and manageable, even for a novice like me! I would highly recommend Richard’s services to anyone looking for a completely approachable professional; my only regret is that I did not go to Place of Design from the beginning

Danny
Baby’s first Calendar Ltd

The design
The design was a two way process with the company. The brief was to faithfully represent the company and present a smart business like, organised, operating worldwide, but based in the UK feel. We feel we have achieved this

We used a crisp readable typography, which follows through to the article editor on the backend. This allows new articles, to have a consistent feel to them

The build
This was a fascinating build for us. Partly we migrated content from the old site. We then restructured and re-formatted the content to fit the new site. We created a template, and then the content framework. We created templates for the content, and the corresponding CSS for the templates. Once the content was dealt with we concentrated on users. Firstly we modified the registration process, to collect specific customer data.

As the site is aimed at a global market, and because the laws and regulations and paperwork vary form region to region, we implemented an ACL, allowing different users to be presented with different content. Depending on if they are a customer or not, the size of the account, and the region they are in

Once we had sorted all the customer issues, we dealt with the SEO and security side of things

The Platform
This was based on Joomla 1.5. We migrated some content and users from the company’s previous Joomla 1.0 website
Dealing with users

APS Global wanted a system where registered users all over the world can be presented with different content. We have provided a structure and framework to facilitate this. We are using ACL (Access Level Control) systems to manage users in pre-determined groupings. This is especially useful for ensuring content relevancy and very useful for marketing. The site is set up to automatically contact users that have not logged in for a while etc.
Content management

We are using a ACL, we also created templates with the relevant CSS in the back end, to enable the company to add new content, including coulombs etc.

SEO
The site as we type is too young to report back on search engine optimisation. We have done some structural on-site / on-page SEO and put in systems to ensure new content gets the same treatment. Titles and URL’s are dynamically generated for optimum SEO. We have implemented a clever URL re-writing regime which creates pretty, readable URL’s. We are also doing some off-site SEO to drive targeted visitors to the website. Down the line we will be doing a SEO analysis, looking at site stats, Google analytics + commercial data, and we will tweak out the site as needed

Feature list
- Multi user CMS site
- Owners can update content as needed
- One touch site backup (database and files)
- Firewall, and other security features
- Automatic CRON based database backups
- Specific user data capture on registration
- Features to promote user loyalty
- Newsletter manager
- ACL – for granting differing users different rights to view content
- Form management (stores forms contents on database and also e-mails)
- Document management
- SEO by design
CSS
We spent a lot of time setting up the cascading style sheets (CSS) for this site. This has provided a uniform framework for user content. Typography was something we looked at carefully, which included the introduction of coulombs within content articles

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, DHTML, XML, AXAX, CSS, HTML and JavaScript

Security
We spent a long time closing doors, adjusting server settings and generally locking the site out from attack and spam. We are using a firewall, white list and black list protection and obfuscated administrative login etc..

We won’t discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss the issue as a topic on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site

Working with the clients
We worked really closely with the clients, listening to their needs, and delivering features and ideas that will allow the website to evolve with the customers business as it expands. It was a pleasure to be involved with this very two way process

The design
We wanted a cutting edge design to show off the wedding photographs at their best.  We also wanted to do a DHTML proof of concept site, taking some of the very best DHTML ideas, and producing a site with Flash qualities, without the poor SEO performance of flash

The build
This was a long build, being put to the back behind all of our customer’s works for ages.  There was a lot of intricate CSS and JavaScript’s to sort out

Thanks
We can not thank Gerard Ferrandez enough for some of the superb DHTML scripts, Also Elizabeth for her patience

The Platform
This is a coded from scratch, designed in house, platform-less build

SEO
SEO is a very important element of the sites design.  Over the next months we will be working quite hard on both the on page and off page SEO

Feature list
- No Flash
- Easy to update
- Cutting edge designs
- SEO by design

CSS
A reversed colour website is often the most challenging; we spent a lot of time on the typography, and CSS.  On top of that, many of the scripts we used dynamically manipulate the CSS

Technologies
This site uses PHP, DHTML, JavaScript, CSS and HTML

Hosting
Hosting was provided internally

Photographs and graphics
Some images are from manufacturers, there are a few stock images on the contact pages etc.  The wedding photography content photographs were all taken by Richard King the Wedding Photographer

Concept
We wanted an intriguing site that would draw the user in, and encourage them to explore. There was a balance between intrigue and usability.  We wanted a site that made the wedding photography “Ping” on the screen.  We definitely didn’t want the traditional wedding photographer’s site.  We have a pretty unique style of photography, and we wanted a site to match

URL
http://www.cash4scrapcars.co.uk/

The brief
Produce a site to generate leads and interest in the business.  The design needed to incorporate the green nature recycling aspects of the business.  Competition in this business sector is strong, and the site needed to equal and better competitor’s sites, in terms of building client confidence, company image and SEO

The design
We opted for a powerful simple clean design.  This reflects the “We do what it says on the tin” nature of the company.  We unusually opted for a top and tails menu, but this does not distract from the simplicity of the site, and navigation is easy

Feature list

• HTML Brochure site
• Validating, secure information collection form, with cleanly formatted e-mails, ready to print for a collection job
• SEO by design

The e-mail form
We put a lot of effort in the front and back end of the booking form.  In the backend, the client is sent a clearly formatted e-mail, ready to print for a driver or telephone operator to work with directly.  The last thing we wanted was to create extra work for the clients, chopping and changing data form the form before they can begin working on an enquiry

CSS & Typography
We opted for a very clean crisp typography.  There is a clear visual split between the titles (serif) and body (non-serif).  We carefully massaged the text for readability

Cross browser support
By design the site is coded to support and display correctly in Safari (on a Mac + PC) IE5 upwards, Firefox 2, 3 and Opera

Technologies
This site uses HTML, PHP, CSS and Javascript

SEO
The scrap car business is fierce, and competition is pretty stiff.  Because of this, as a bonus to our customer, we have opted to make this site a SEO showcase site.  We have carefully crafted the text, descriptions, title tags etc. We are fully expecting the site to perform excellently on search engines, once the site has had time to mature and be spidered by the search engines. We will update this page in a few months to report on how the site is doing for our targeted keywords and phrases

*** update  ***
The site was launched on 14th August.  It was entered onto google local on 14th August.  It generated it’s first sale on 15th August.  The site was spidered by Google on 23rd August, and is now enjoying page 1 Google results for the customers target phrases!

Google result for Cash for scrap cars

The site is achieveing even better results for GEO targeted searches, which is exactly what the customer specified

Hosting
This site is hosted on our commercial hosting package, which costs just £100 pa

Address for the site: www.burtonjoycehome.co.uk

The cost of moving
Estate agents locally are charging between 1 and 2% of the value of a house. That’s a lot of cash, for really not doing very much. They measure up, take some dark rubbish photography, do a poor write-up, and slap you on a popular house portal website and wait. If you don’t believe us, go and look at more than 10 houses on any of the housing portals, and you can see what we mean

As you will probably know – the most popular house sale website in the UK is a run by a cartel of estate agents, who basically don’t allow private sales. Apparently we just can not be trusted to purvey the property information accurately. Having seen some of the descriptions that estate agents manage to write, we think somewhat this is a pot calling the ‘shiny’ kettle black situation!

There is however a way around this – some estate agents will market your house for you for a low fixed fee. By providing such an estate agent with a write-up, photography, and producing a more than decent website, we managed to negotiate the fee down considerably to a few hundred pounds. Google “internet estate agents”

What we did
We produced a super website, with fantastic photography (we are professional photographers). We made sure the website was optimised for search engines by design. We promoted the site carefully – locally and on Google. We had 500 leaflets printed for £35.00 and then had the leaflets delivered locally. We brought some signs that we designed ourselves from a printing company advertising on a popular online auction site

The content of the website and the leaflets, and the photography revolves around honestly presenting the property. We can see no point in someone driving for hours to see the property, in order to find out it isn’t what they wanted. This approach is paying off. Preparing for a viewing takes time and effort, and we definitely don’t want pointless viewings

Presentation
We are looking for houses, and we are appalled by the poor photography for houses on estate agents brochures. Remembering they are charging £1000’s to the vendors of these properties – what exactly are they spending the money on?

A professional photographer session in your home will be £300 upwards depending on the size of the house, but then the estate agents fees increase on a larger house. We are providing downloadable brochure, high resolution image packs, and HIP pack etc. The point being that we don’t want to show people around the house who don’t want the house. By actually being honest about the property, all of our viewings have been spot on

Results

The site did the job THE HOUSE IS SOLD STC! and within a few months too!!!! we are calling that a A1 result

Costs
Website: We did this in-house. A similar website would be in the order of £500
Photography: We did this in-house, similar photography would be in the order of £300
Leaflets: designed in-house, design costs – unsure – but printing was £35.00
Delivery of leaflets – local paper shop – £15.00
For sale boards – we designed these in house, available for 6.99 each + 6.99 postage from a seller on a popular auction site

Assuming a sale – (we will keep you posted); we have spent a grand total of:

£245.00 – one of payment to internet estate agent in order to get our house listed online on the most popular auction site
£35.00 – leaflet printing
£15.00 – leaflet delivery
£20.97 – for sale boards
£50.00 – for a premium home.co.uk listing
5.99 – for a .co.uk domain name
£371.96 – grand total

This represents a saving of £4328.04 on the amount the estate agents wanted to charge us!

Even if we paid a photographer £300.00, and a web designer £500.00 we would be saving £3528.04

What else can you do?
There are plenty of private sales sites – home.uk being the best, which has generated us 1 viewing

Advice
Take a step back, and understand what your estate agent actually does for you. They will argue they contact customers and drum up business. In fact 70% of what they do, we did for ourselves, but to a much higher standard

That means that in our case we would be paying £4328.04 for that 30% we are missing out on. In fact, estate agents who have sent us details to “our brief” have bee way off. Our brief is “Rural, isolated, period or character + space for the business” what has been coming through the door in the post is “estate, small, modern” In essence that 30% isn’t looking that rosy after all

We are not suggesting all traditional office based estate agents offer poor service, it is that so far we are struggling to find one that offers a good service at a reasonable price

Do you want to do what we did?

Sure – contact us. We will happily photograph and produce a website for your house. You will need to provide a good high quality write-up

We can provide you contacts for the boards, and HIP packs, we will provide you contacts for the online estate agents. If you want a leaflet designing, or the board designing, we can do that for small fee. We can provide you contacts for printing etc. We will do the initial Google promotion, and SEO, and give you guidance on how to promote the site locally

We are based in Nottingham, and do travel, however if you are too far away, we can find a local photographer to do the shoot for you (We have a network of very good professional photographers to call on)

For an average sized house, we will charge £500 for the website and £300 for the photography. Large houses will be proportionate to the amount of extra work involved (not the amount the house is worth)

Want to find out more, just contact us

Essentially Elizabeth is a wedding planner and event planner.  Seh organises weddings, and does on the day coordanation etc..  Elizabeth wanted a really small and easy to use brochure site that reflected her business and personality. The site is visually designed to “the boss’s” exact specification (you have to smile, I am under duress)

The brief
“Make me a site and we stay married…” I joke. Elizabeth wanted a site which explained her packages, and acted as a web based business card. Elizabeth wanted a site she could keep up to date herself, and add pages in a blog type format. More pages will arrive soon (so I have been told)

The design
The site is pretty close to the creative wedding planning stationary. Elizabeth wanted rich colours, and red roses etc.. The site is a simple WordPress blog. We used a fairly standard template and heavily modified it to suit

Feature list
- Customer updatable blog type site
- Contact form
- Comments stripped out of the design
- Security by design
- SEO by design

CSS & Typography
The typography for the site was tailored specifically to match the business house font. The only difference was the character spacing which was tweaked for readability

Cross browser support
By design the site is coded to support and display correctly in Safari (on a Mac + PC) IE,7 Firefox 2, 3 and Opera

Technologies
This site uses HTML, PHP, SQL, CSS and Javascript. The site is based on a heavily modified Worpress installation

SEO
As with all of our sites – the site has SEO built in. For new posts a system is included that allows custom meta information to be added on a post by post basis

Training
I’ve been under training… Whoops, I mean I have trained Elizabeth who is pretty technophobic to use the back end of the blog herself. She will be adding all of her own content as time goes by. This is a testament to how easy a user updatable site can be for the user. For small businesses, who want to add and organise information, the blog type site (with a few design tweaks) is a very powerful tool. This site (place of design) is based on the same platform

If you want to know how easy it is living with a site like this, just call Elizabeth on 0115 845 8953 and have a chat to her about her website

The brief
We were to design and develop a bespoke site, which represented the way the customer sees her business, both in terms of style and delivery.  The site would have a portfolio, secure contact form – along with a tightly integrated gallery and blog

Site history
Caron previously had an incomplete Joomla installation, which was attempting to sell and show photography using a Virtuemart store.  Joomla + Virtuemart is normally an excellent combination, but as a vehicle for showing and selling photographs, it really doesn’t work

The design
We worked really closely with the client to produce a template, and the typography for the site.  We bounced around ideas for a few weeks, fine tuning some ideas, and resigning others to the recycle bin.  In the end, we produced a really clean fresh airy template, that lets the customers photography shine out

We wanted the blog and gallery to have a total visual integration with the site

Working with the client
We had a very close working relationship with the client allowing us to produce exactly what the client asked for.  We developed some ideas, demonstrated them to the client, and then had a 2 way discussion with the customer.  We then modified these ideas, taking onboard the clients comments.  Working like this allowed us to produce a unique site, which the client is delighted with

Feature list
- Customer updatable portfolio – with a beautiful slideshow
- Static information based site
- Fully integrated, secure, fully featured photo gallery with e-commerce
- Fully integrated blog
- Security by design
- SEO by design

CSS & Typography
The typography for the site was developed in-house, and then tweaked to the client’s specification.  The seamless integration of the very diversely different dynamic parts of the site with the static parts of the site is due to the smart way the template and CSS are put together

Cross browser support
By design the site is coded to support and display correctly in Safari (on a Mac + PC) IE 5,6,7 Firefox 2, 3 and Opera

Technologies
This site uses HTML, PHP, SQL, DHTML, AJAX, A server firewall,  CSS and Javascript

SEO
As with all of our sites – the site has SEO built in – across both the static and dynamic parts of the site

Portfolio’s
The client shoots a range of different types of photography.  The portfolio section is simple, and to the point, allowing the work to showcase itself.  We used a particularly pretty reflection slideshow which we heavily modified and crafted into the site design

Photography gallery
We used a standard installation of Gallery2, and then got to work on the templates to fit the site design.  This has produced a visually unique installation of G2 retaining all of the backend and front end functionality.  One feature that is particularly excellent for photographers is Gallery Remote – which allows drag and drop of images from the photographers desktop

Blog
We used an installation of WordPress, and then wrote a template for it, to match the sites template

Training
We don’t just install and run.  We install, and bring our customers up to speed with the front and back ends of the website.  WordPress and Gallery2 have fairly steep learning curves, and we are there all the way through the learning process with the client, ironing out issues, and explaining how to use the site

Total integration
It might seem that we are banging on about this, but a bespoke static site, with a blog, and gallery, with a seamless integration between all of the component parts is a big deal, and not seen very often.  Often, sites have 3 different looks, as users jump between the different sections.  We are really pleased with the overall look

The future
We will continue to support and work with the customer over the following months and years, providing further training, minor tweaks and updates as required

The site
www.merlinswakefield.com

The design
We had a bit of fun with the design, and it encompased a few features that really spring life into the site. For the background we heavily styled one of our stock photographs. We wanted the header to be fun, but not get in the way, letting the user concentrate on the page.  We designed the header in house using FLASH.  We worked a dark moody style by using careful typography

The Platform
This was based on a really good open source CMS platform – Joomla, with a modified Virtuemart store.  More about that later

Dealing with users
The site does some quite clever things.  To begin if a user is just shopping, they can register, and they automatically have an account in the forum, the store etc.. or if they register for the forum, a shopping account is created automatically.  The site remembers abandoned shopping carts, and offers them back to users on a re-visit.  The site can also automatically recognise users that havent visited for a while and send “come back” emails

The forum
No need to re-invent the wheel, we used Fireboard, and re-wrote the templates to give a totally homogenous style with the rest of the site. Users are managed via the CMS system

The store
This is a specially modified Virtumart installation. The store presented us another challenge – the previous site was a 1-off database, with a 1-off structure.  To top this, the previous host, and designer wasn’t allowing Control Panel access.   Fortunatally, we managed to figure out how to mount the database, using just FTP access (dont ask), extract and convert the data and import it into the new installation.  That took a lot of work, but a lot less than typing in about a 1000 products!  The import included dealing with the 1000’s of iamges, which we had to bulk re-size using Lightroom.  The store presnted another chalenge – Postage.  We had to develop a specific postage module to allow a split postage method in-house

SEO
I can’t stress enough that Search Engine Optimisation is something that you need to keep re-visiting, and changing, but only when the data really is telling you something.  The site as we type is too young to report back on SEO, but we have put together the same superbly performing system as we used on the Lencarta site.  Titles and URLS are dynamically generated for optimum SEO.  Combined with a clever URL re-writing regime which creates pretty, readable URL’s we are sure we have another winner on our hands. Down the line we will be doing a SEO anaysis, looking at site stats, google analytics + commercial data, and we will tweak out the site as needed

Feature list
- E-commerce based on a heavily modified Virtuemart set up
- Forum
- Community based user management
- Automatic CRON based database backups
- Manual full site (with database) zip backups
- Multi user CMS
- PayPalX credit / debit card integration
- Security by design
- SEO by design

CSS
We spent a lot of time setting up the cascading style sheets for this site.  This has provided a uniform framework for user content.  At the templating stage we spent a lot of time and attention to ensuring cross browser compatibility, and ensuring the more interactive features gracefully depreciate for older or non compliant browsers.  Like all of our builds, the site was rolled out in phases – Template, store, content and backend features

Technologies
This site uses PHP, SQL, DHTML, XML, AXAX, CSS and Javascript

Security
Clearly a high profile, user oriented site needs some level of security.  We spent a long time closing doors, adjusting server settings and generally locking the site out from attack and spam.  We wont discuss security details here, but would be happy to discuss it in general on the phone with prospective clients

Hosting
We are providing our unlimited commercial hosting package for this site

The launch
We launched the site, and within minutes we had a sale!

Working with the clients
We worked really closely with the clients, providing 1-1 remote desktop training (we take over the clients machine) and telephone support.  We will continue to support the clients over the next months, providing training as needed

Client testimonial

We are delighted with the way Richard and Elizabeth from www.placeofdesign.com have produced our website. Richard is always there with help and guidance, and I would not hesitate in recommending their services to anyone thinking about a website – first class!

Phil
Merlins of Wakefield (UK)