The La La Card Company website

Posted in Portfolio Ecommerce on 2 March 2010 | Comments

Here’s a little plug for an ecommerce website that we launched recently. The La La Card Company sells decoupage card kits, single card kits and other card-making items for download.

The design was created from Photoshop images provided by the client and we used SugarSync to share a folder between us. SugarSync is a back-up and synchonisation tool but you can also use it to share folders with someone else. It worked really well.

For this project, we built a demo product listing page on a testing server so that the client could see how the product might be displayed. This work was paid for by the client but it served to highlight a number of issues that were addressed in the website itself. I will probably do this with other clients if there are questions that cannot be answered before an ecommerce project starts.

Now that the The La La Card Company has been launched, we may not be doing as much work with it but I think it’s important to say that an ecommerce website (or any website for that matter) is never actually finished. There are always items that can be added or pages to be tweaked and the shop software can be updated. In fact, most websites would benefit from a continual programme of improvements but often this is not done. If you are a small business with a website that has been static (ahem) for a while, I would urge you to consider allocating someone from your company to update the website or get someone on board to carry out a maintenance programme even if it’s only for an hour or two every month. After all, you wouldn’t ignore other parts of your business would you?

The Red Lyon website redesigned

Posted in Portfolio Pubs on 8 February 2010 | Comments [1]

We’ve just launched a new website for the Red Lyon, a pub in Slinfold, which is a small village in West Sussex. It’s one of our local country pubs near Horsham so it was good to get involved with the redesign.

For this project, it was quite important for the website to be updated by the pub landlord so we chose to use WordPress as the content management system and a theme from ThemeForest as the basis for the design. WordPress has traditionally been used as a blog platform but after customisation it’s equally suitable for a brochure-style website with individual pages.

We also wanted to make sure that the website is effectively indexed by search engines and that a Google sitemap is automatically generated when the website is updated. There are many plug-ins for Wordpress which enable you to tweak the core functions and these are the search engine-related WordPress plug-ins we used for this project:

• The Google (XML) Sitemaps Generator
• Add Meta Tags.

We also modified the page titles using a custom field and several other plug-ins were used, in part to give more flexibility with the page sidebar if we choose. WordPress is a very good website content management system but it usually requires customisation to get the best from it (in my opinion).

We hope to be doing more with the website over the next few months.

New website for fitted kitchens company

Posted in Portfolio Web design on 3 November 2009 | Comments [2]

Earlier this year, we were asked to design a new website for Chappelsons who are a local company that supply and install fitted kitchens, bedrooms and home studies. The existing website was quite old and we jumped at the chance to redesign it based on the company’s newer logo.

As part of this project, we wanted to highlight several examples of different styles of kitchens, bedrooms and home studies that Chappelsons can provide. Rather than a list of images in a gallery, which can take up a lot of page space, we chose to use a JavaScript content slider called Easy Slider [which I blogged about here]. This is an attractive but compact way of displaying page content. This type of script using jQuery as its foundation has the added advantage that the slider content is still visible in the page for search engines to index. I think it works quite well.

Info: With JavaScript turned off, the images and slide content are still visible but just not displayed as a slideshow.

Organising website content sensibly

Posted in Portfolio Web design on 21 February 2009 | Comments

We were asked to design a new website for The Professional Centre for Traditional Chinese Medicine for 2009. The new website launched last week.

During the website development, there was some discussion about how many pages would be required. The website copy was provided by the client and it seemed to organise itself naturally into seven pages but there was a brief period of discussion about whether less pages would be better. In these cases, I generally err on the side of more pages with less content rather than less pages with more on each. This is not a hard and fast rule because it makes no sense if the content is split up needlessly. However, in general, I try and organise website page content and the overall website structure into reasonably small and sensible sections because it seems to me to be more easily read and navigated that way.

Of course, when organising your website content, you also need to consider search engines. There is an SEO school of thought that says you should aim for a specific number of words per page and that pages with less than 100-200 words do not have enough text for search engines [for example, What’s the ideal word count?]. I’m not totally convinced by this but I think it’s better to organise things as sensibly as you can for your intended web visitors [of the human kind] rather than rigidly following a specific guideline.

ProShot Events website

Posted in Portfolio on 28 November 2008 | Comments

After a quick set-up, ProShot Events was launched yesterday. The website is only a couple of pages at this stage but we wanted to do a few ‘introductions’, ‘invite a few search engine friends round’ now, before adding more content to it over the weeks ahead. Sometimes, it makes more sense to get it out there.

During the style sheet work on this project, I considered the use of CSS tables [see this post] because the column layout would lend itself to this quite nicely. However, I am rather reluctant to start including this method now because of the lack of Internet Explorer browser support. Additionally, I was working to a bit of a deadline and the use of conditionally commented style sheets added to the work. At the moment, the website does not use any conditional comments. Do I want to add this in order to use a method that is not supported by approximately 75% of the browsers used by anticipated website visitors? At the moment, not sure that I do. However, for my own testing purposes, I will probably create the same layout using CSS tables when I have a bit more time.

There’s more to do on ProShot Events for sure but I’m quite pleased how it’s turned out so far.