“Sixtyeight Creative Solutions have been instrumental in developing our web site to what it is today. When they started work our online sales represented just 2% of our turnover and now they account for at least 20%. We have always found sixtyeight a pleasure to work with and cannot fault their service” - Jim Lawrence
Jim Lawrence design, hand craft and manufacture quality items for the home. They are a mail order business with no trade or high street outlets. They have been operating for over 14 years with continuous growth. All business is conducted by mail order or via the web site. Their quality products include soft furnishings including silk curtains, curtain poles, lighting, door and window furniture and ironmongery.
Requirements
To create a new web site to replace the initial template based site that provided the company with their first journey into the web. Navigation needed to be simple and quick, products would need to be searched for or browsed through. Customers should feel constantly invited to contact Jim Lawrence with any question or request. Visitors should be able to build their own bespoke curtain pole pack online as well as browse individual items. All product information should be easily updated by Jim Lawrence staff and a media area was identified as a future enhancement.
sixtyeight's solution
The design had to be clean and that is a trademark of sixtyeight - so no problem there. The site was built using Macromedia ColdFusion markup language. A bespoke shopping cart application was created from scratch to meet the particular requirements of the client. A flexible design using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) enables quick site-wide changes to colour and layout.
In addition to the shopping cart with content management and order history the following applications were developed for the site:
Pole Builder - allowing custom curtain pole packs to be built online by the user including, finials, brackets, rings and holdbacks.
What People Say - a display of comments from customers maintained by Jim himself using our custom administration module.
Reports - referring url's for orders are compiled to provide a report of sales. Giving the client valuable information as to how their online marketing was performing.
Media Area - where members of the media register to gain access to high resolution images of all products including useful room scenes. This feature makes it easy for journalists and magazine editors to gather resources for magazine articles featuring Jim Lawrence products. Registered users can download the required image or request it to be emailed to them.
Catalogue requests - visitors to the site can either download PDF files of the current product catalogue or request one to be sent in the post.
Collaboration
We were initially introduced to Jim Lawrence by Barber Jackson who we have worked with on various projects for nearly 10 years. They have provided advertising agency services to Jim Lawrence for a number of years now. The catalogues designed and produced by Barber Jackson along with their advertising campaigns in national press have been very successfully in promoting a growing range of products.
