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

Marlin was also keen to have a secure contact form.  This is provided using a PHP script in the background that handles email.  We produced very simple and effective typography for the site, which although uses a standard browser font, is very readable after we worked the letter and word spacings

Address: www.marlinworldwide.co.uk/

Address: www.lencarta.com

Building the site
The build was to a very specified time scale, and included formatting all the product images.  The build involved very close cooperation with Lencarta on a day to day basis during the build, and then some followup work with customers after the build.  The build was done in phases, with a server move and dealing with the existing site to minimise downtime and disruption

Content management
This is a CMS site.  That means the staff at Lencarta can edit content themselves from all corners of the country, and access the back end of the store and process orders remotely.  It was important for our client to have a site that was instant and reactive to their very flexible needs

Feature list
- E-commerce based on a heavily modified Virtuemart set up
- Automatic CRON based database backups
- Manual full site (with database) zip backups
- Multi user CMS
- PROTX credit / debit card integration
- Clear efficient organisation of information
- 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 framework for user contents which is uniform.  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

SEO
We used a really neat system on this site – the site automatically generates some of the SEO, by design.  Som is more manual and pinpointed.  The result is a broad spectrum of very individually marketed and high ranking page.  Considering that google and firefox had blacklisted the previous site on the same domain, We are very proud to say we had a few page 1’s placements, not to mention the No. 1 placements on Google in under 3 weeks!

Hosting
The previous site we replaced was hosted on an un-patched old server with PHP 3 on it.  This explains why it was unfortunately hacked and full of viruses.  We provided the client with a superb commercial hosting package on fully patched servers with unlimited SQL databases, unlimited bandwidth and a clever e-mail solution

Training
You can’t provide a site like this without providing training.  We have set up a totally separate training site in another domain for the Lencarta staff to learn how to edit and add content, and how to use the web store.  We also provided one-to-one remote desktop training where we instructed on the basics even though we are at different ends of the country.  After a few hours, the staff at Lencarta learnt the backend.  The provision of a training site is a real bonus, as ideas and processes can be tested away from the real site, allowing user errors to be ironed out before they are able to edit on the main site

Systems integration
We provided a method of exporting orders into a third parties remote warehouse computer system.  This involved formatting the orders into .CSV files which are feed into a warehouses back-end computer system

The future
Over the years we expect the Lencarta business to grow.  By design the site can evolve with Lencarta’s growth, which will come with 100% support from the Place of design team

Customer testimonial

Historically, Lencarta has relied on Ebay sales for several years and when we decided on a new e-commerce website for our new range of studio lighting products we simply didn’t understand the value of a professional web designer and we didn’t realise the importance of good hosting either.

As a result, we bought an expensive and totally useless website that both we and our customers found impossible to use. Sales plummeted and we then asked Richard King to start from scratch, with what turned out to be a very complex, highly technical operation that needed to both work well and look good.

The new website was completed on time and it works brilliantly. We have no hesitation in recommending Richard, who is extremely helpful as well as being creative and producing technically excellent work.

H Liu – Lencarta
Contact lencarta