Client Name: Pure Lana – Jo and Richard
Domain name: www.purelana.com
Date Started: July 2011
Date Live: November 2011
Website Type: Ecommerce/web shop
The Brief:
Pure Lana is a brand new company that was looking to sell luxurious items online. The items were a mixture of Homeware (cushions, throws, leather trunks) and Fashion (shawls, Hats, Gloves).
The client wanted a web shop set up and created, from their own artwork and design.
The client had purchased the domain name they required hosting, email creation/set up – as well as the shop software set up and installed, and then their own design templated throughout.
The client was able to provide a spreadsheet of the shop items I would insert and set up each one – applying imagery to ensure brand continuity throughout.
The client had quite fixed ideas on how the website should look, feel and also work – and so I needed to work within their constraints to ensure that the website I created was exactly what they wanted.
The Work:
Having never worked with Jo or Richard before, the first thing was we had to meet and hash out everything that she wanted from the website. It was great to not only meet Jo but also to see some of the products so that I could understand the feel of them – as they truly are very luxurious. And the whole website needed to reflect that!
They had run a web shop before so they were up to speed on how things worked and so had a good fixed idea on what and how the shop would work.
Kevin (designer) created the design with Richard and Jo – until they had a design that they liked – they also kept me in the loop so that I could make suggestions or changes to make the shopping experience better from the customers point of view.
Whilst this was going on I set up the hosting, set up their email accounts and then set up a static one page web site saying “coming soon”.
Website hosting – you can read more about website hosting here
Once the design was signed off – I then set about installed the shop software (zen cart) and implementing the design.
The design implementation is often the hardest part of this type of website as you have to create the website so that it will work and look the same in all browsers for all people – as well as smart phones and ipads. Ensuring a consistent brand and feel on all pages!
Once the design was in place Jo and Richard (with Kevin) were able to review the design to ensure it was an expected and matched their brief. Any tweaks were then made to ensure that the clients were 100% happy.
Then came the time to insert the main categories, sub categories and finally all the products. I had to ensure that the flow of the website and how people got to the products was quick and simple.
Once the website had all of the products installed we then tested it over and over again to ensure that everything worked and nothing was missed.
Once the clients were happy – it went live.
The testing and tweaking phase can often take a long time – as this is when you have to make sure everything is perfect! There is no point having a website that you are not 100% proud of!
Once live I was then able to do some of the search engine bits – adding statistic package, inserting link into my own website – tweeting about it!, sending a link to various search engines – and generally making sure that it was “out there”
The follow up:
I have continued to work with Jo and Richard on their website to help them with:
• Setting up social media – twitter, Facebook, tumblr blog
• Tweaking the descriptions and search engine meta tags to ensure that they get good visibility in the search engines
• Helped with Facebook campaigns – to drive more traffic to the website
• Inserting new products/categories when required
• Adding new modules to the shop to attractive more customers
• And generally keeping in touch on a regular basis to make sure that the client is happy.
What the customer said:
Web Squared (Sarah) came highly recommended and it became clear from our initial discussions that we would benefit from the tools and the experience we needed to make our e-commerce site a success. Whilst we were familiar with static website construction, understanding the e-commerce element was totally new. Sarah de-mystified the whole process and helped us through each step of the construction process and we are very pleased with the results. Support is so important during the build and post-development stages. We can contact Sarah at any time and she is always on-hand to offer us constructive and helpful advice, take action quickly and encourage us to continually update our site. We are confident we have a solid platform from which to grow our on-line business. Jo Walker, Director.
