The Conservatory florist - online shop & website re-design

The Conservatory florist in Richmond approached us last year (back in the days of 2008!) to help them re-design their site and launch with a full e-commerce online shop.  The Conservatory is located in Richmond, Surrey near the green and and have clients such as Mick Jagger, Ebay, Twickenham Rugby Club, Teenage Cancer Trust and more, specialising in wedding and bridal flowers, flowers for events and business - and now have an online shop!

The Conservatory came to us and asked for a unique design that represented their approach to both their business and their clients, taking into account their current branding, history and culture.  They also wanted the ability to sell bouquets, arrangements and flowers online.  Their e-commerce platform gives them the ability to fully manage the order process, view graphs, reports and statistics on sales and their customers.

Having full control over their products means they can cross and up-sell products where relevant and of course the shop is designed with search engines in mind. Customers can create accounts so they can manage their orders, subscribe to newsletters, re-order products and track their items.  All this making the user journey more comfortable and positive.

Tracking Customers and Website Users

When building the site, and like we do for all our customers, we added tracking applications and software so we can track the customers that go through the website.  We can even tell what operating system they were using!  This important information, as any true marketeer will tell you, is gold dust!  Being able to see how many people visited your site, where they went, for how long amongst many other statistics helps you identify strong and weak areas of your website.  As return on investment is key, you can produce a better picture of how your website is performing.  You can even track offers and offer alternate pages to your users, always refining and developing your site so it becomes a customer converting machine!

Search Engine Consideration

Online shops, e-commerce platforms and content management systems that are designed around a database, can be problematic for search engines in finding information they need.  If your platform generates urls that look like this www.myshop.com?page=23333?id=34?category=2 chances are both your users and a search engine (lets say google!) can get confused.  More importantly, this confusion means that google may not index your page (meaning you have less chance of your pages appearing in Google’s search results - that’s bad!).  Consider a url design that looks like this:  www.myshop.com/a-nice-category/a-great-product-name/ Search Engines much prefer this and so would your users  as it’s descriptive and user-friendly.

URL design is just one of the many considerations and challenges that you face when working with dynamically generated content from a database and deserves it’s own post (which i’ll do later!)

Category: Redhead news
Tags: ecommerce, news, online shop, search engine optimisation