Chalfont St Peter Community Association

One of the web sites that we had under development was for the local Community Association which operates Chalfont St Peter Community Centre. As we are local to Chalfont St Peter and we know so many people here, it was a great project to be involved in.

The web site gives an overview of the Community Centre and the leisure groups that operate from there and how to hire one of the rooms.

The site is built using CSS and has Google Analytics to monitor the web site traffic.

Protx will become ...

We blogged recently about Protx and that they are our preferred third party payment provider. Further to this, Protx have since announced that as of 21st April they will be operating under the 'Sage Pay' name.

Product Photography

Over the years we have found that having quality images on your web site really enhances the end result and on ecommerce web sites, improves the conversion of sales.

If you are unable to source good quality photos from your manufacturers, then we would always recommend that you invest time and money in taking quality photos. We have a limited facility to take photos on behalf of clients - for example CSE Distributors - we are gradually working through their warehouse and taking detailed photographs of their products. Each section we have revamped, we have noticed an improvement in sales. Allowing prospective customers to look at the products in detail to help them choose which product they require is tremendously powerful.

As an example, click the link for ABB Contactors which we recently put up and took the photos for. We can also add a watermark if required.

If you require a dedicated photographer then we will always recommend Darren House for his product photography - we worked with him on the Trading Depot web site.

Ecommerce Consultant / Project Manager

If you are looking to implement an e-commerce web site that fully integrates with your business system, you should ideally have a project manager / ecommerce consultant to manage the process and be a focal point of the project.

Here are a few things for a project manager to include in the specification document for a development company who is quoting - they are in no particular order:

• Can I see reference sites of it working
• How will it handle different shipping areas across the UK / Europe (eg the Islands, Northern Ireland, Remote Scotish mainland etc)
• Can it handle non ecommerce web information eg blogs, case studies, background information on products, industry standards etc
• Can the title tag be bespoke written and how does it handle meta keywords and description
• How effective is the fraud screening of the third party payment provider they integrate with
• Adding Google Analytics code at the bottom of each page
• Search engine friendly page names eg ecommerce-consultant.htm as opposed to the dynamic database driven query results
• Where is the location of the image - can it handle more than one size eg thumbnail, normal, large and high resolution (if required)
• If shipping overseas can two lots of weights be implemented - standard weight and volumetric weight and shipping based on different weights
• Can XML feeds be generated for Google Base and other comparison shopping engines such as shopzilla, shopping.com etc
• Does it integrate with Ebay
• Can a product be built by choices - eg a PC
• Generating a sitemap for Google
• Printable copy of page stylesheet
• Same product in multiple areas
• If you are despatching from various branches can the invoice / packing note be routed accordingly
• Previous customers can see their off line and on-line order history if they register an account
• Is it integrated with an affiliate programme eg tradedoubler
• Can customers print out their own invoices
• Can it handle bespoke 501 errors on the site

These are just some of the items your ecommerce consultant / project manager will include in a specification document which is final so the costs don't spiral. Of course they will also be a focal point to smooth things around your organisation - especially if you are retail and developing a distribution model through on-line - a completely different way of operating.

I could go on about business issues such as shipping and IBT's but this post is to give you a flavour of some of the things a system should be spec'd to do.

I undertook an element of this for a client on an 18 month project which successfully lanched a year ago and is now trading successfully on-line.

Further blogs will be posted outlining some of the above points in more detail and other things to consider as a business.