2010 is here and the new website for flooring company Yours4Floors has gone live! This brand new e-commerce site, designed and developed by Beaver Design, has given the North London based flooring business a strong online presence to sell their products and reach more customers.

All of Yours4Floors’ products can be ordered online through the site and paid for directly through PayPal. The site uses a clear menu structure to help visitors quickly find what they are looking for and even calculates how much flooring is required, based on the total floor area – so it’s easy for customers to find out how many packs are needed.

As always with new business ventures, a cost effective site was key for Yours4Floors. With this in mind, we created a simple content management system which allows Yours4Floors to add, edit and remove products to the site. This simple system means that the site will stay up-to-date and relevant over the coming months.

For more information and to view this site, please go to:

www.yours4floors.co.uk

Beaver Design has completed a new website for Foila – the advanced hair foil preparation system. Foila helps improve productivity and efficiency in professional hair salons with the Folia Dispenser and Refoil products.

Foila asked us to create them a site which looked and functioned like other high-end, fashion led websites. Like the Foila product itself, we designed a website which is a stylish reflection of their brand. Simple and contemporary designs were put together, along with some modern web features.

Working with the production team from Media 14, Beaver Design also integrated a demonstration of Foila into the website – demonstrating some of its cost saving benefits for salons in a short video.

Form as well as function

The website is created using the latest web design techniques, featuring an online shop, a savings calculator and search engine optimisation. The site also features a content management system, which allows Foila to amend and update the pages as they need to.

With a new, stylish and well designed web presence, Foila has a strong position to help reach their customers and promote their hair salon products.

For more information and to view the site, please go to:
www.foila.com

In this month's issue of Axis Magazine we've discussed the dot-com era and what it’s like for modern e-commerce.

Download your copy of our Web Advice article from Axis Magazine (1.2MB) >

When the dot-com bubble burst in 2000, many companies went bust and confidence in the online world was damaged. A few big players survived, taking a large market share and they now enjoy great success (Amazon, eBay, Play.com). But many smaller companies were lost.

Other companies which survived were either not looking too big or had a real-world presence to back them up. The mentality of “get big quick” was destined to only pay off for a fraction of the players involved. There were simply too many companies competing to do the same thing, with too much investment and not enough actual business. Business models designed to operate at a loss for years, just to win enough of a market share for profit later on.

Back to the present

These days, successful e-commerce companies dont tend to look at dominating the web, but instead see it as a way to position a their company to sell online. A good way to think about it is like companies setting up another branch or store, which just happens to be online. This is why they resemble shops, with areas for different items, baskets while you shop, checkouts and so on. Some websites even feature live help, where a representative can chat to customer through a chat window.

Woolworths was a high profile casualty of the recession last Christmas. Because they slashed their prices, other retailers were forced to do the same in order to remain competitive. In the end, Woolworths closed, but they were unfortunately only the first. Poor Christmas sales and a general down-turn in the economy have forced other retailers to tighten their belts and prepare for a harsh couple of years. But it's not all doom and gloom - according to the Woolworth’s website, the store will be re-launching in the summer; this time online.

With the speed at which customers can browse websites, the key is to make sure they quickly find what they’re looking for. Research has shown that customers in the past have taken up to 34 hours to make a buying decision. Having a site which is easy to navigate and where possible, remembers who they are and what they looked at before, will help bring in those sales. Shopping online is a quick "I need it now" kind of shopping and one which you can get into quite easily.

In the early days, the dot-com world seemed like just a fad and for some, during the bubble burst of 2000, it was. E-Commerce is now commonly accepted, more sophisticated and proving to be more resilient during these times of economic recession. If you haven't thought about it before or you've had bad experiences, think about it again and see what e-commerce could mean for your business.

More on e-commerce

Shoppers shun high street for online bargains >
Retail sales down by 1.9% in March >
Wikipedia article on the dot-com bubble >
Woolworths is coming back online >
Some e-commerce stories (of varying successes) from Debenhams, Argos and Sainsbury >

Beaver Design has finished work on another site for our client Rapier Group, who are the company responsible for managing the 1st Pan-Asian Computerised Tomographic Colonography Congress (it just rolls of the tongue!).

The website from Beaver gives attendees a place to register for the event and pay for their place. This system is controllable by Rapier Group via a custom built CMS system. As the conference date gets closer, prices for the tickets auatomatically increase, as pre-set by Rapier Group.

Delegates can log in and register their place, with the system remembering their details on return visits. The site is designed to provide delegates with all the detail they will need for this three day conference and since the event is being hosted in China, the site features both English and Chinese text. In addition, the site has an international payment system from World Pay, to allow payment from the multinational users.

To view the site and find out more, please go to:

www.ctcasia.org

Beaver Design has created a complete custom built website for the pharmaceutical company – Kudos Vitamins. The design of the site is easy to navigate with a clear menu. With information about Kudos Vitamins, the site also has information about how vitamin and herbal supplements can benefit particular lifestyles.

The web design features an e-commerce function, allowing visitors to browse products and order securely online. Users can log back in after their first use and see a history of previous orders, as well the website as saving their details to save time entering them again.

A major benefit of the web design for Kudos Vitamins has been the creation of a completely bespoke Content Management System (CMS) by Beaver Design. It allows Kudos Vitamins to independently control all the content of their site; altering images, lists of products available, special offer prices and product details. 

It also provides further functionality to control the way the pages themselves are coded, allowing them to add keywords and alter page titles, making the site ‘search engine friendly’. A unique ‘Body Part Diagram’ for use with the product descriptions is also completely editable through CMS, adding further functionality for Kudos Vitamins.

To view the site, please go to:

www.kudosvitamins.com