Villa and Hut UK

http://www.villaandhut.co.uk/

I was contacted via Nick Cross at Niris (our SEO experts) by Guy at Villa and Hut since he wanted a much needed revamp of his existing website.  The existing site was pretty basic, in that it listed his range of eco furniture but not much else.  Also Guy decided that the theme of the site was not really up to scratch.

Redesign and Development

In our discussions I discovered that Guy had a pretty good knowledge of using PC and the internet so a complete content management system would be the most efficient and cost effective way for him to update the site with new products and offers.This was to include not only the products and categories on the site but also the general pages (home, about etc.) and a powerful newsletter system and registration system so Villa and Hut could keep in constant contact with their customer base.

Special Effects and Features

Due to the fact that I knew that Nick would be doing his usual exemplary job of search engine optimising i thought that it would be a good idea if i integrated some funky features that would add lots of content pages that were highly focused on the product range.

Tag Cloud

Tag clouds are great features that enable the site administrator track what people are looking for, and also to help the customer base quickly and easily find the products that they most likely need.  Obviously this is no replacement for a full keyword search engine (which Villa and Hut also has), but is also useful in creating listing pages automatically without the web developer having to actually create them.

VIP Members and Email newsletters

Customers can easily add their email to Villa and Hut's email list, and then by using the Mailman GNU mailing list software in the background Guy can quickly and easily create newsletters in whatever email client he prefers and then by simply sending an email to a special email address the newsletters will be delivered in good time.

Lightbox display for products

Obviously customers to Villa and Hut need to see good quality photographs for the items they wish to purchase, and again I wanted to do this in a funky and easy way.  So i used the lightbox method to display the larger photographs.  (this is pretty common place now for most websites, but still pretty rare for web shops)