We are going to have an in-depth look at the factors causing a low conversion. These may be blended – no real individual reason, but a blend of different reasons. It is worth both yourself auditing your own site, and having others audit your site for you against the following criteria. You need broad shoulders – be prepared to accept what others say, and understand that your view is possibly a little polarised

What is conversion?

Before we get going, like all things that need managing properly, conversion is easily measureable

Your sites conversion is simply:
(Visitors who performed the desired task / Number of visitors) x 100

Factors causing low conversion

1. Poor site design
2. Poor products
3. Hidden pricing
4. Poor quality photography and write-ups for the product
5. Site usability issues
6. Non-competitive pricing
7. Site sends out wrong messages
8. Attracting the wrong customers to your site in the first place
9. Communication issues
10. Organisation issues
11. Lack of reassurance
12. Dealing with objections
13. Localisation issues

Poor site design

Modern consumers demand crisp, easy to use, well designed sites that are pixel perfect

It is really interesting to ask a real shop owner what they think about their shop – they will always say it is clean, tidy, well fitted and decorated. It is a visual thing

A visitor however instantly sees the cracking paint, the faded POS, the dusty floor straight away – and this influences the sale. This has a lot to do with consumer confidence. The “shop looks shabby” translates to “the stock looks dated” having a knock on effect on the desire to spend. Exactly the same principles apply to online retailing. Untidy design, poor quality graphics, dated design, messy typography or broken pages all contribute to lowering conversion.

Just like in the high street shop, consumers translate “sloppy design” to: “I can not trust them to send me my product”, or “the product will be shabby”

The second element of poor design is more subtle. Is the design steering the customer the right way? Are the important elements of the design in the right places? Example – why have navigation which requires the user to scroll down? Where is the shopping cart? Where is the product search? Is it obvious how to buy something? Is the buy option too many clicks away? Does the design actually suit your offering?

The third major issue with design is usability, which we will look at later in the article. There are some obvious things that just drive visitors away. Reversed text (white text on a black background) usually is just unreadable. Menus that don’t work in certain browsers etc will also have visitors leaving as fast as they came.

The only certain way to know if your site has bad design is to ask someone to review the site for you impartially. We have a team of approx. 20 consumers we use for such a purpose. You may want to ask your staff to get their spouses or friends to use your site and evaluate it for you

Poor products

This is a no-brainer. If you are offering poor quality out of date products, then your image will suffer and so will sales. Whilst it is painful writing off products, or using them to sweeten the sale of the products your customers do want – something will need to be done. Consumers will just click away if you do not have the right products or indeed products of a high enough quality in your online store

Back to the high street… We have all seen shops grasping on to the five year old dress or cassette deck, which was over-ordered and now won’t shift. Displaying it only puts consumers off buying anything else. Dead stock needs dealing with, and ought not to be in any primary position in your store. Exactly the same thought process happens in the consumers mind in an e-commerce environment

Hidden pricing

We all hate hidden pricing, and we meet it far too often. One of the largest causes of abandoned carts is hidden pricing – postage or some service is normally the culprit

Do everything you can to avoid hidden pricing. Be upfront with your postage costs and do not spring surprises on the store visitor, especially at the last moment

Think how you would feel in the following scenario

I offer you 400 business cards for £1.00 – you fill in your name, address, you design the cards online, you fill in a long form with names and addresses, and then at the last moment, the “printing shipping and handling fees are £8.99

You feel: “cheated”, “it’s a con”, “I have wasted my time”

Conversely how would you feel if I said?
“400 business cards, you design them online, we print them, deliver them for free, within 3 working days for just £9.99”

You would think: Sounds like a great deal, I want to buy, and you would even recommend me

Poor quality photography and product write-ups

You go to a beautiful high class jeweller – what does their point of sale look like – PERFECT, in fact very perfect – perfect by design. Everything about the way they present the product, talk about the product is spot on. You go to a back street jeweller – and the prices are the same, but the point of sale is dented, the velvet dusty. You speak to the staff, they don’t really know the product that well – which shop will you buy your engagement ring in. The first one of course
Exactly the same applies to online stores, for point of sale, read photography, for sales assistant, read product write-up.

Fact
Too many stores have poor quality product photography; it stands out a mile, makes consumers cringe and drastically reduces sales. Paying a professional is not cheap, but if you want to sell products, this is exactly what you need to do. Paying for a professional is indeed not cheap; it offers very good value for money when looking at the big picture
Photography also needs to be uniform and fairly homogeneous. When its style or quality jumps from page to page – or worse still on the same page, the store visitor mentally notes untidiness, and the chance of a sale is reduced

Fact
People buy in different ways, and you need to accommodate different styles of buying. Some people are “educated buyers” they have already decided exactly what they want, they are looking for a specific product, and it will be price, and service that determine if your store will make a sale. Some people are fact seeking buyers – they want comparisons, datasheets, colour charts. They need to know all of these things before purchasing. Some people are visual – they need to see visual details about the products, others are emotional – they need to know how the product will make them feel, the benefits

All of these shoppers can be accommodated by “layering information” in a methodical way.

The e-commerce information layer stack

Layer 0: Front of the store – sets the tone and breaks down barriers, invites the browser in – same as the traditional shop window
Layer 1: The category page – orientates the customer, each product with an image, a brief description, a few benefits – the high street store equivalent is the departments in a store
Layer 2: The product page, explaining benefits, showing more images, testimonials, detailed description – Almost the traditional high street store equivalent of POS and the product itself
Layer 3: Data layer – technical specifications, datasheets, extended colour charts, dimensions, health and safety datasheets etc. In the real world, this is the manual, the data on the box, the paint chart, the leaflet with the wardrobe dimensions

If at each layer, the customer can buy, then the store presents more and more information about a product as the customer clicks deeper into the layers, all types of customer are catered for

Many stores ignore the quality of later 2, and layer 3, and often totally omit layer 3. This disenfranchise the undecided fact seeking customer whilst also reducing the content readable by a search engine

Other important issues about the product write-up

The quality of the words, the craft of the phrasing, the call to action, the usage of English and the conciseness of the text is very important.

Just as having a professionally produced product images is very important, having professionally written texts will make the world of difference to conversion. Using a professional copywriter can pay absolute dividends. The difference to changing one or two words can make to conversion is dramatic

Site assessability and usability issues

There are 2 areas to this – accessibility, and usability. If you get either of these issues slightly wrong, then your sites conversion will be much poorer than it can be

Some people are deaf, some people are blind, some have learning disabilities, others struggle to concentrate. Designing your site, giving options to people with disabilities, or making sure that by design they are innately catered for is a must

Blind and visually impaired users may use screen readers. Does your site cater for this?   Is your site optimised in any way for this? Visually impaired people struggle with small text, reversed text, low contrast text. There is no reason at all why you need to make it hard for such people

Giving verbal instructions, via audio is cool, but how about a text version – Great for deaf people and great for search engines too

Having an inclusive site is the aim; don’t drive away customers by being thoughtless with your design
The next area is usability. Do you know what browsers your customers use? Your website statistics will tell you. If your customers are on corporate networks, they may be locked to using IE6 and an old version of Flash. Some sites are totally non-viewable by the customers they want the most – people who are working, and earning money, whilst they surf at work on a break
Do all of the technologies in your store work in all the browsers, properly? How about on phones? Or micro PC’s? What about customers on a Mac?

You really do want to avoid:

• Dead links
• Cryptic processes
• Fancy clever menus, when a simple one will do
• Un-readable text (do look on many machines, reversed or white on black, or grey on black is the worst culprit)
• Too many things going on a page
• Inconsistent navigation, or menus that move from page to page
• Non-obvious / obscured / hidden links

The aim is to have really logical navigation, with consistency. If clicking on images opens the next page, make that a site wide feature. If the menu is on the left, keep it there. If the add to cart button is under the product image, keep it there on all pages

Important features like “add to cart” and “checkout” and “Search” must be very obvious and consistent on you site. Website designers, and site owners who know their own sites backwards, don’t believe people get lost in their websites. The only way to know is get new users to test it for you, and then listen to their honest comments

Can your customer add any product to the cart in fewer than 3 clicks? The less clicks, the higher your conversion will be

Any accessibility or usability issue WILL impact in the wrong way your sites conversion

Non competitive pricing

While it sounds very obvious, having your pricing set too high (or low) will have a fundamental effect on conversion

Online store owners have a much finer line to judge than traditional retailers. The process of buying in a bricks and mortar shop is physical. You drive to town, you park, you walk to the shop, you browse, try to remember the price, go to the next shop… Conversion in high street stores is easier, because shopping elsewhere requires effort

Shopping elsewhere for online customer is easy – you can even be in many shops at once. Comparisons are easy, and the effort to look elsewhere is minimal. This is why getting the price spot on is so much more an issue for online shops

Have you analysed your competition? If you haven’t, you ought to be, constantly in some sectors. Why not offer a “price match”, get people to e-mail you where they can get it lower. Don’t guarantee a price match, but offer to look at it

Site sends out wrong messages

We have all seen sites that we cringe at… Why did they say that? Simply, it is because the owner and designer think the site looks OK

For some people cheap, loud in your face window salesman type advertising is absolutely fine for a fine art book shop. For others, it just drives them away. Again the only way to know, is independent testing
It is very important to give several people from different viewpoints evaluate your whole site, its proposition, its texts and imagery

Attracting the wrong customers to your site in the first place

There is an obsession in some quarters that website traffic is good. Peruse forums, and people are desperate for traffic.

YOU ARE PAID IN CASH. YOU ARE NOT PAID IN HITS OR VISITORS

Getting the correct, demographically profiled traffic is exactly what you want. When you consider Adwords, PPC or SEO make sure you are driving traffic to your site, from the correct demographic group, that are actually searching for your products, that are actually form the right geographic location

Any other visitor potentially just increases your server load and slows your site down. You don’t want traffic, you want the right traffic

Communication issues

Failing to get the right message over properly will have an adverse effect on your web shops conversion. Pay particular attention to where a customer is seeing an image and text at the same time – Is the message consistent and on the same sheet?

Communication issues can be cultural. In the USA Pants are the British equivalent of trousers. In the UK, pants are underwear. Knowing and dealing with such issues will have a direct effect on conversion, and reduce refunds

Be very aware of your target demographic – what is acceptable for adults in terms of font usage, complexity of language – will be totally unacceptable on a children’s site. However, there will be times (in the checkout for example) where the language needs to become adult again

Some products lend themselves to technical descriptions, others to visual descriptions. Others require both. Have you fine tuned your site to maximise this distinction?

It is well known that some people see and describe things in the following groupings: Aural, visual, tactile, and in terms of numbers and facts. Failing to present your products in such terms will possibly disenfranchise some groups of users. Clearly some products can’t be all of these terms, but by understanding and trying to accommodate the four types of visitor, your conversion will rise

Organisation issues

How products are (or are not) organised will make a huge difference to conversion, and the up-sell. Some products naturally fall into a few categories, and have natural links to other products. To ignore this, will result in decreased conversion, and a lower average order value

Look at every product in your store – is it in the right category? Does it also belong in another? Can you sell something else with it

The next thing to consider is attributes. Consider an online ladies shoe shop. In stead of displaying the shoes in terms of: trainers, boots, court shoes – why not offer choices to aid selection
Filter by: colour, heel size, style and shoe size
By offering filtered searching, your store can be more effective at converting customers – because the consumer simply can find the product they require efficiently

Lack of reassurance

Many online consumers are rightfully sceptical. Are you reassuring them – example do you have real address, phone number, customer care line? Without these, some people think they are being conned, and wont buy

Leaving just a mobile number and a POBOX says – I want to take your money and run to some consumers
How about returning goods, refunds policies – are there clearly defined texts in place that are friendly and reassuring?

Does your copy try to mislead the customer, is your copy positive and helpful, or sowing a twisted convoluted deal? The fist scenario reassures the second just turns people away. We recommend you have a third party assess your site for this, because often site owners are too close to the text to notice the problems

How about honest consumer reviews? Reviews are usually on a product by product basis, where consumers can rate and leave reviews on your goods and services. Not only will you find out what people want, your consumers will know what other consumers think

Dealing with objections

In real high street retailing, salesmen deal with objections verbally, face to face. Objections can be very varied, and dealing with objections effectively is usually the defining difference between a well performing salesman and a porr performing salesman

Online the principle is the same, but you need to predict the objections. You ought to be doing SWOT analysis for each product, and deciding if and where the core group of objections lay. FAQ’s are an easy way to resolve objections, but also inviting people to call a free phone number to discuss their questions, will pop your site ahead of the crowd, and ultimately increase turnover

If you know your product well, and you have sold it face to face, you will know the top ten objections to a sale. Make sure your site is addressing them

Localisation issues

Really this refers to the fact that most stores are based on American English. By failing to properly localise all of the texts in your store, you are subliminally sending a mixed message – we are not a local company, we are an American company. The little differences zip code / post code etc. are really picked up by consumers, and can contribute to a lower conversion

If your store markets to multiple countries, you need accurate translations, and easy contact details for each country. If you market to USA and UK, then you will need two language templates

Conclusion

This article really covers the very basics which cause conversion to be lower than its natural level should be. Raising conversion even higher than its natural level is a fine art, that deserves discussion all on its own.

If you make sure you don’t get any of the basics wrong, you will be ready for the next step – Raising conversion above its natural level

About the Author

I have had more than 20 years experience of face to face selling and store management in a retail environment

I recognise that many in the online e-commerce environment have no experience of real face to face shop keeping. I aim to transfer my real retail skills into my client’s e-commerce environment

I have been developing websites for as long as websites have been developed, If you are looking for a designer that offers real experience where it matters call me

If this article has provoked you into action, or you want a new store done properly from the word go, call Richard King on 0115 845 8953 to get the ball rolling

Comparison to real bricks and mortar stores
There are a lot of comparisons between high street retailing and e-commerce. But some things are not given. Something’s that seem totally logical in a real shop seem numbingly illogical in an e-commerce store. For this reason, discussing your needs with a designer at the preliminary stages is a very good idea, helping you find your boundaries a lot faster

A really good example of this is stock control. In a real store, stock control is easy, you sell things one by one through a till, and the stock level decreases. If you bundle products together, things are taken “out of stock” bundled and put into stock. With online, retailers just assume the online store packages will bundle and organise stock for them, this is sometimes isn’t the case

Before specifying an e-commerce site, you need to consider

• How / who / where you physically deliver stock – what processes do you need to make your “real” backend systems work
• How are you getting / who is organising / what is you POS material (photography / write-ups)
• What pricing structure(s) you want
• How products are related to each other. Example king sized bed base + king sized mattress makes sense, whereas king sized bed base + single mattress makes no sense at all. Or buy product A, and product B… and you need to buy product C to hold them together etc…

All of these processes above are done on autopilot in a retail environment, in a e-commerce store they need to be fleshed out with rules, detailed ones!

Specification for an online store

Please note that I’m not telling you what to do I am really challenging you to think a bit in the right areas, I am outlining the areas that will need a lot of attention

Marketing
Internet marketing is about
• Understanding & designing for demographics
• Getting right visitors on the site
• Converting visitors into paying visitors
• Encouraging them to come again and tell their friends

The specification for the website ought to include everything, form a code and design view that will facilitate the above… Data collection, method to email customers from the database, on page search engine optimisation, Microsites (if needed) for specific demographics / products etc…

If the designer gets his bit right, the subsequent marketing efforts will be cheaper. You must appreciate that Internet marketing and conversion is an ongoing task, and requires a lot of patience and effort once the site is live. A good designer will give you the framework to make the subsequent efforts easier

Taking money
You will need a robust and secure method of payments that suits your business model – different providers have different rates of fees at different price points. Example if your Average order value is £1.00, you would be unwise to pay £0.50 per transaction. Conversely if your average order value is £500, you would be daft to pay a percentage, especially if £0.50 per transaction is available. Different shopping cart systems will and won’t integrate with different payment gateways. You need to know who you will be wanting to use (and have a backup provider) before you specify the store

Displaying the product
If you sell ring tones, your needs for displaying the product are completely different to selling spanners. The specification for displaying each product needs to be detailed

For example:
• I need this media (audio, video, pictures)
• I need x amount of additional images
• I need datasheet
• I need a category, and quick product description, and a long product description, with a video feed etc..

Think very hard about how you want the product to be displayed – structurally, in an organisational sense and visually. Do you need a product search?

Speak to a designer before nailing this part of a specification down – there are other (search engine optimisation / conversion) reasons why a certain route may be more suitable

Legal stuff
You need to cover your bases in different ways depending on your product – you need to consider the distance selling regulations the data protection act etc. This means you need certain texts freely accessible on your site

Accessibility
How friendly do you want the site to be? Do you want to offer “print me” pages with plain styling, do you want a large text version etc.

Servers
Moving a store that is (for example) hitting a bandwidth issue on a server, to a bigger server, is a royal pain, causing down time – you will need:

• A secure server that is patched and well maintained
• A server with the technologies you require to ensure functionality
• A server that is scalable, especially if video or a high rate of traffic is anticipated

If you haven’t chosen a server, you need to discuss this with the designer. Some e-commerce platforms require certain server setups etc..

Stock
Describe how the site deals with bundles (if you are selling bundles) and what happens when an item goes out (and back into stock)

Usability (for you)
Some e-commerce platforms are a pleasure in the backend, others are a nightmare

Support
What support does your provider give you, is there a manual, is there an online community. Are there prompt security patches

Backup
How do you easily back the whole store up?

Shipping
Define exactly how you ship, what rates, and where you ship too

Example questions:
• Do you ship for the same price to the Outer Hebrides as mainland UK
• Are you offering tracking?
• Are you offering shipping to France?
• Does the price change for next day?
• What if the product is in 2 boxes?
• Do you ship by weight and dimensions?

Be very sure about what you want before you get started. Again different packages have different ideas and systems on shipping

The future
Are you going to expand? If so – what is the plan? Some systems are very scalable, others not so

Integrations
How your store interacts with the rest of your business is important

• Do you need integrations to accounts packages – which ones?
• Do you need integration to a warehouse – if so, what is the specification?
• Do you need a Froogal feed? (Ask us if you don’t know what this is)

There are probably 100’s of other minor things to consider, but this lot should be food for thought

About the Author

Richard King has had many years of experience in real retail management, and many years experience in providing e-commerce for online retailers

Call Richard today to discuss your needs, and find out how easy getting your business idea online can be

0115 845 8953

A microsite or series of microsites can be used to differentiate products and services from a company’s global offering. A consumer or site visitor doesn’t have to wade through all of the products to find the specific product. The marketing for the microsite is very narrow, undiluted. Whereas the marketing for a companies main website may be multi-threaded, because the companies offerings are diverse

Benefits
The main site benefits because the microsite feeds totally relevant customers to it. The main site also benefits because it is gains page rank from the microsites, whose marketing is pinpoint

The next benefit of microsites is evaluative A/B comparisons. A marketing idea, concept, product can be lunched alongside another, and the results from the microsites compared

Usage
Microsites are not exclusive to e-commerce; the application in the service sector is just as striking. Take a photographer for example who shoots weddings, events, food stock photography and portraits. The demographic for his 4 groups of customer will be different, as will be what they expect when they come to a website. By creating a main site that deals with his online logistics (galleries, overall company profile etc), a series of microsites can market the distinctly different types of photography. Brides see weddings and pictures of brides etc. Magazine editors are marketed to separately, with a separate site for food stock photography etc.

Reflecting the real world
This is more than a online practice. Like all good online practices – Microsites mirror traditional advertising and bricks and mortar business. Example – if a well known retailer sells clothes and food in its main store, it makes complete sense to open a smaller “food only store”. This is exactly what happens on the high street. Furthermore, marketing just the food, is clever, because it is focused – the knock on effect is clothing sales in the main store, where the “must have clothing item” is carefully positioned near the food. The switch or swapping one customer into another is also a key part of microsites

Target the demographic market properly
It is important to understand your products demographic. A product that is equally useful to the older and younger generations is a good example. If you market this generically, both generations may feel disenfranchised. If you make a split, and have “Senior site” and a Junior site” where the branding, the imagery and wording is totally aimed at each generation separately, both feel the product is wholly applicable to themselves. The sales of the product can occur on the microsite, or on the main site

Marketing the site
In principle we treat a microsite just like any other website – it is marketed independently, the phraseology, the copy, the images ought to be independent. The promotion of the site / product – traditional or online is also independent

We do not promote underhand SEO practices. A microsite just needs the best SEO practices applied to its construction and marketing. the narrow focus of the content makes this relatively a simple process

It is important to allow users (and search engines) to access the main site. Simple navigation is key here. This can be a one way process or not, as required. See the main site as a hub with many small microsites radiating from it and sending on-topic relevant visitors to it

Evaluation and statistics
Because the microsites allow you to differentiate between campaigns, consider the usage of separate e-mail / phone / lead tracking to aid your decision making processes. This method will give you qualitative data to work with. Just as we use Google analytics, web statistics to understand the main site – ensure new accounts are set up for the microsites

Microsites are small, but each page within the microsite can function within its own rights. Make sure that each page is optimised in its own right. Optimised in terms of SEO, and in terms of what it is selling, and who it is selling it to

Conclusion
With so many “dubious” online marketing methods out there, this method is a breath of fresh air. It properly targets your different customer groups, It will increase your conversion, it is a fantastic tool for evaluating a new product or marketing idea, and it will promote your main site properly

Costs
We develop microsites from as little as £500 per site. Subsequent SEO and marketing for each site is something we would quote for separately. The more sites in a campaign, the lower the unit cost. Price may vary depending on the structure of your current e-commerce environment, and the level of step-through integration that is required.

Like all websites, small doesn’t always need to mean un-sophisticated – which will be reflected in the pricing. It is worth noting that in a series of sites, some work (systems integration for example) only needs to be done once

About the author

I am the principle at Place of design. I have a wealth of experience in managing and marketing real businesses, both on and off line. I bring the best offline practices from the real world of retail and services – and re-apply them online

Feel free to call me and discuss your business needs
Richard King
0115 845 853

Get this one in your head, it is the mantra for e-commerce:
Turnover = (average order value x conversion x number of visitors) – refunds

Turnover: sales generated from the site. You will have a margin built in to this that you need to consider in the maths
Average order value: Just that – all your site sales divided by the number of site sale
Conversion: The  number of site visitors compared to number of sales expressed as a percentage
Number of visitors: The number of unique visitors or number of visits, depending on your point of view
Refunds: need little explaination, but are a good indicator of quality and customer service

Conversion

Before we deal with traffic into the site, we need to look at conversion. Why is this important? Well let’s look at the numbers for typical conversion. Forgetting the sector, usual figures are between 0.5 and 8% most are at the lower end of this scale

Example
If your conversion is a measly 1%, then increasing it by another 0.5% will increase your turnover by 1.5 times, which is what selling is about!

If you increased your visitor traffic by 1% then your turnover will increase 1.01 times, which is a small beer change. Proportionately, getting conversion right will increase your turnover compared to the effort of increasing visitors. In fact, there is a valid argument that says if you double your conversion, the cost of getting each customer is proportionately halved, which increases your profitability too

Factors causing low conversion

• Poor site design
• Poor products
• Hidden pricing
• Poor quality photography and write-ups for the product
• Site usability issues
• Non-competitive pricing
• Site sends out wrong messages
• Attracting the wrong customers to your site in the first place

Find out more here: Increasing the conversion of your website

AOV Average Order Value

Essentially, if you can increase the spend of a customer already committed to a sale. If you do this, you make more money. Sounds obvious, but many e-commerce sites don’t employ techniques to cross sell and up sell. I will discuss the methods to increase average order value in a later article

Number of visitors

Yes increasing the number of visitors will increase sales, SO LONG AS THE VISITORS HAVE RELEVANCE

Relevance
e.g. you sell golf shoes – no point at all sending a customer who isn’t a golfer to your site, not in the slightest

Ensuring visitor relevance is tricky. There are so many people who view things in terms of “hits” or “visitors” This thought process needs to be adjusted to “how many relevant visitors come to my site”

Measuring relevance is very hard; however when you choose a route that is designed to send you more visitors, if you can’t see how it is sending you relevant visitors don’t bother. The point I am making is that whatever route you choose to drive visitors to your site, make every effort to ensure you drive relevant visitors to your site, not random ones

You can drive visitors to your site in many ways
I will discuss this huge topic in another article on another day

Refunds
We all hate these, and there are some techniques in avoiding them. I will look at this area in another article

About the Author

I am a website designer; however my background is retail management. I apply the processes that I learnt in bricks and mortar retailing to the web. Having a real face to face retail background enables me to understand why customer service and system efficiency are very important. E-commerce is traditionally very weak at customer service, and web marketing is traditionally very blinkered to “web only techniques”

If you want to deal with someone who does understand the big picture, just drop me a line

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)

Working with the client
We feel part of web design is working with and listening to a client to understand their needs.  In this build, it became apparent the client was pretty OK with FTP, and wanted to be able to update the site herself.  We designed aspects of the site to make this really easy, all the way down to the point of supplying specifically modified slide show template files for Photoshop

The approach to this website was pretty easy.  The client being a creative sort, already had a firm idea on the design and look for the site.  See: www.clairejuliette.co.uk

Claire Juliette Creative Photography

We followed the clients ideas, chipped in a few of our own and produced this superb compact website.  The client had an existing Coppermine gallery, which we re-templated to suite the site

Hosting woes
Late last year, the clients original web host begun to pull all sorts of strange stunts – for example changing the SQL database passwords without telling anyone and generally service levels dropped.  The client has now migrated to our servers

The migration
We needed to move a SQL database, and a lot of scripts. we managed to do this and just swap DNS servers over at the last moment causing little loss in service.  The migration was pretty seamless

Hosting
Like most of our clients, this site is hosted in our unlimited hosting package – that is unlimited bandwidth, web space, SQL databases, POP accounts, FTP accounts.. you get the idea

The future
We have created the client a lovely new gallery that back-ends onto a e-commerce setup.  We will be launching this fully with the client in the near future.  As the client is a wedding photographer, selling images online is a absolute necessity nowadays