The Bead Pot – Website Design
We originally designed The Bead Pot website back in 2012, meeting the owner Amy Mason at one of the photographic training days we use to run. Amy run a business from a boutique shop in Canterbury that specialised in supplying all the materials that you needed to create your own jewellery, hence the name “The Bead Pot”.
Since then Amy’s business has grown and developed, she has now gone 100% online and the current website wasn’t meeting its full potential. With digital standards continually evolving we set about to bring her website up to date. Amy no longer offers jewellery making accessories and has instead turned to creating rustic, personalised, one off pieces of hand-stammped gifts and jewellery.
With the integration of Social Media becoming that much more important we set about integrating links as much as possible. We started by adding social links in the header area of the website so it is available on every page.
We then added a live feed to instagram in the footer and added more social links so they were available at the bottom of the page as well as the top.
To make searching more effective we added a search bar in the header so that vendors can find products much quicker and efficiently.
As the type of products had changed we needed to produce 3 new hero images with new “Call to Actions”. After discussions it was decided that the Call To Action sliders should link to specific Product Categories.
Customer testimonials are important to generate new business, an area needed to be created to showcase these. Using a parallax effect like this one we created an area on the homepage for testimonials.
Wherever possible we added more Call To Action sections to break the page up and add interest.
With all orders now being taken online this meant that more products need to be showcased on the homepage for bigger impact. Sections showing 4 products from the most popular categories are now included on the homepage.
Branding is a word that is over used and often mis-understood, with most of what we do here at Scorpion Media we are referring to Visual Branding – The Physical Things you see. However Branding is also about your Values, your Vision and your Mission, it is about peoples relationship, personal relationship to your brand. It is really important that people are aware of who The Bead Pot is, how it started and who is its face. Therefore this year we gave it a face and borrowed one of the designers IG pictures to illustrate this. People buy from people and if they can relate to you then they will make a happier purchase.
The Shop has had some big additions, the first set is all about the ease of searching and filtering. We have added a Search Box and a Filter by Price and Filter by Category options in the sidebar.
To prompt impulse purchases we have included “Recently Viewed” products in the sidebar.
A new Compare Product feature has been added. By clicking on Compare it adds the product to a compare list. It then displays the products on a page where you can compare the features of each product.
Wishlist is another new feature, if a vendor is interested in a product they can save it to their wishlist by clicking “Add to Wishlist” on the product page.
They can also share their wishlist to social media so that people know what to get them for their Birthday, Christmas or special occasion.
New galleries have been created to show off Customer Creations, the galleries are now easy to add new images and re-arrange the order.
SEO is another great buzz word, meaning Search Engine Optimisation. We believe that the best type of SEO is natural listings. Therefore we have been making sure the site is secure using an SSL Certificate, it is fast using a CDN and optimised content, and that all the images are accessible with Titles and Alt Tags. On top of this we have created Favicons for the symbols on tabs, Touch Icons for mobile device bookmarking and lastly installed a Traffic Light System to help Amy optimise her own content with keywords.
To increase security and protect data we have made a lot of changes on the backend, but on the front end we have set up Google reCaptcha tool to make sure that the site is secure from robots.
Last but by no means least we have made invoicing and packing that little bit simpler by integrating software to automatically generate a new invoice when a new order is received, this is emailed direct to the client. Invoices and packing slips can then be printed straight from the orders page by simply clicking a little red icon.
Do you have a similar e-commerce business that you need help with? Give us a call on 0800 135 7687 to discuss.
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