One of our sites – Merlins Magic
Merlins Wakefield is a bricks and mortar magic shop. They had a online store that was under-performing, and needed some web magic (couldn’t resist, sorry). We were asked to provide a user-oriented site, with a community element. The owners wanted a site they could be in control of, and update and generate new content themselves
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)
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