Web Development Articles from York web designers Semlyen IT

York Food and Drink Festival has been an important event in York’s gourmet calendar for years, and is rapidly extending its scope from York to the whole of Yorkshire. We have created a shopping cart system for them.

We have previously used Mal’s cart with several other clients, which is a great solution for small e-commerce websites. In this case, though, we needed some more advanced features. Therefore we have built an entirely bespoke system with the following features that are missing from third party carts like Mal’s.

Customer management Customers can create an account, subscribe to one or more mailing lists and get their purchases associated with their accounts. They may view their order history and print confirmations after logging in, simply by typing in their email address and password.

The customer management system was crucial for York Food Festival as they wished to provide discounted tickets to the supporters, ‘friends’ of the Festival, and at the same time they wanted to enable their customers to become a ‘friend’ by buying a special ticket.

Stock management As with all booking systems we had to make sure that if a customer puts a ticket in their virtual shopping basket they will actually be able to buy it on check out without having to fear that someone might have been quicker. This feature is essential for tickets, however, you might want to take control of your stock even if you are not selling tickets.

As a customer adds an item to their basket the system puts it in ‘hold’ for 30 minutes. For that time no one else can buy it. So effectively the customer has half an hour to complete the payment.

We have also made the system able to handle event limits to make sure we don’t oversell tickets. This can certainly be useful with other kinds of products as well, where you may have a limited amount in stock – as you do in most cases. We have also added the facility to set up a cut-off limit. Over that limit tickets are not available online; they can only be purchased through the Ticket Line.

User experience A rock solid back-end is inevitable for building a reliable shopping cart, however, we have also put a great amount of work in user experience. A fully customized shopping cart can easily win customers’ confidence. Your customers are not transferred to third party carts, they will stay on your website while they are shopping.

Our system allows customers to put the desired item straight into the cart after clicking on ‘Add to basket’ without even having to load a new page. This technology is called AJAX. Your customer can continue shopping without having to click to an “add to cart page”, but can still view their cart at any time with a single click.

Someone who is using an older browser needn’t worry either: it will work in older browsers as well. Technically speaking: it degrades gracefully.

Administration area We have developed an administration system which allows manually entry of orders by the client. This means orders by customers who don’t have an internet connection or prefer to order via telephone, can still be inserted into the system and managed in the same way. The administrator takes orders and payments through telephone and enters the details in the administration system. Their purchases will appear alongside all other orders in one single system.

Further features of the system include the ability to add new, or search existing clients and view their order histories. Administrators are also able to resend email confirmations in case the customer has accidently deleted theirs.

Finally, the best way to measure the success of this website is by its sales, and we are proud that after just a few days from the launch, the website is producing a high volume of sales.

Bookmark this post:

We don’t really do much tech support here, but we always try to be helpful to our clients when they’re experiencing problems.

Whatever the problem is, and whether it’s with hardware, software or a website, there are a few things you can do to help the techies of this world help you.

The golden rule, of course, is: don’t panic! And before you turn-it-off-and-on-again -

1. Grab that error message!
When something goes wrong, make a note of what it says. That error report may not mean anything to you but it will to someone. If it’s on a web page, chances are you’ll be able to copy-and-paste it into an email. A half-remembered error report can confuse the issue no end.

2. What’s going on?
A clear, step-by-step description of what you were doing when you got the error helps enormously. If you got the error on a webpage, let us know exactly which one it was – copy the contents of the address bar into an email. If you were uploading a file, send us the file. If it was something on your computer, remember all the programs you had open at the time, and tell us the last thing you did before the error showed up.

3. Your machine
It’s vital to know what you’re using – which browser, which operating system. Is it Windows, Linux, or Mac? Are you using Internet Explorer, Firefox, Safari or Opera? The first thing a techie will try to do is replicate the error. Chances are it’s not something that happened when they tested it, so what’s the difference between your machine and theirs?

Here’s a great resource to get all this info quickly: www.supportdetails.com from Imulus, who earn serious brownie points for this site. It gives you all the details about your own system and lets you download them as a CSV or PDF, or just send it all in an email straight to your local techies.

4. Even better: show us!
The best you can do: as soon as anything goes wrong, grab that screen! On a Windows machine, pressing Print Screen (often labelled “PrtScn”) actually does just that – it grabs the current screen and puts it in the Windows clipboard. You can then paste it into an image file and save it using MS Paint (under ‘Accessories ‘) or – your favourite and mine – IrfanView, the free image viewer. In Mac OS X, I’m reliably informed, Command-Shift-3 will take a screenshot and save it as a file on your desktop.

Send this screenshot to your helpful techie friends and it’ll help them no end.

This has the added benefit of showing us what you’ve got open and what operating system you’re using. It’ll tell us – roughly – what version of what browser you’re using, and which operating system. They tell a thousand words, you know!

Bookmark this post:

Cycling related websites are proving to be an excellent area of business for us. There are several in our portfolio already, and some more in the pipeline.

Last year we built a website for the York Festival of Cycling, and this was followed by a new site for Get Cycling, one of several projects run by the Company of Cyclists. Get Cycling is a community interest company which organises and promotes cycling events, bike try-out roadshows and cycling festivals all over the UK.

One offshoot of Get Cycling is now having its own website developed. Bikeboost is a scheme set up to promote and support cycling to and from work in urban areas. The first city to participate in the programme is Sheffield (one of the UK’s hilliest cities!) where 800 people will take up cycling to work. The scheme provides bike loans and support over a two year period, and will offer free cycle training in association with Sheffield cycling organisation Pedal Ready.

Our contribution to the project was a sophisticated bespoke (no pun intended) online system to manage the various BikeBoosts. Participants can register their interest and fill in an online questionnaire about their current commuting habits. People are selected to take part based on this information and the number of places available, and they are then given an account within the BikeBoost site.

Once admitted, participants can log into their account on the BikeBoost website and record their experiences and progress throughout the challenge, keeping track of the distances logged by themselves and their colleagues.

The online system makes it a whole lot easier to sign people up, loan them bikes, and find out how they’re doing. Reports on the facts and figures of the challenge are available at the click of a button.

Another project run by Company of Cyclists is Cyclorama, an enormous, multilingual online cycling resource which is still being developed. Cyclorama incorporates the online cycling magazine Bike Culture, which features a vast array of cycling articles and essays on practically every aspect of cycling imaginable. The site also serves as an exhibition space for specialist cycle designers, manufacturers and retailers. Each exhibitor has their own profile page, which contains a portfolio of their products and a blog.

Last month saw the launch of a website for the Big Bad Bike Ride, a sponsored charity bike ride which has been raising money to fund research into Friedreich’s ataxia since 1991. This site was set up to provide up-to-date news and information to participants, and to take online registrations and payments. Participants can also collect their sponsorship money online through Just Giving.

The next cycling-related website that we will be developing is Cycling City York, a project for the City of York Council which will promote York’s status as a Cycling City.

Bookmark this post:

Andrew’s Golf

This new e-commerce site sells a variety of golfing products – instructional golf books, golf accessories and golf gifts. It also features additional online golf resources such as advice, videos and a readers’ forum.

The site was designed in partnership with Mode, and coded by Semlyen IT. The shopping cart is powered by Mal’s e-commerce. The site will be launched very soon.

Mobile Shredding Company

The Mobile Shredding Company specialises in shredding confidential waste using environmentally friendly methods. The shredded paper is taken to a nearby recycling centre once the documents have been destroyed, and this is always included as part of their paper shredding service.

They also shred various other materials as well as paper: their shredding portfolio includes interview audio tapes, floppy disks, computer back up tapes, CDs and DVDs, magnetic media, USB Memory sticks, uniforms, security passes, credit and loyalty cards.

This brochure site was designed by Bivouac Design Solutions and coded at Semlyen IT. Its SEO treatment included keyword and keyphrase research into the many different variants of ‘paper shredding services’ that people might search for – it could be ‘paper shredders’ or ‘paper shredding’, to start with – and then there’s ‘confidential waste shredders‘ or ‘shredding’ or even ‘confidential waste disposal‘ or ‘confidential waste destruction‘.

With a small site it’s hard to cover every possible variation. The site has therefore been optimised for phrases that receive reasonably high search volumes, but not necessarily those that receive the highest, as these are usually more both competitive and more generic.

For example, a search for ‘paper shredders’ on Google will produce pages selling paper shredding devices in addition to people offering paper shredding services. Even though ‘paper shredders’ is a more common search term than ‘paper shredding services’, it’s better to be more specific and optimise for the latter. This increases the likelihood of a page one Google position as there is less competition. It also means that people who find the site are likely to be searching for paper shredding services rather than a shredding device, and therefore should generate a higher percentage of actual customers from the search traffic that reaches the site.

Brassed On!

A new site sponsored, designed and coded by Semlyen IT, featuring a logo created by Caroline from Royal Fireworks Press (whose site we also manage). The site is powered by WordPress.

Brassed On! is York’s Brass Band Festival, inspired by the film Brassed Off. It will feature all five of York’s brass bands, plus a young people’s masterclass led by members of the Grimethorpe Colliery Band. The festival takes place on 2nd – 3rd May.

Bookmark this post:

In providing an SEO service, we often find ourselves dealing with different situations from site to site. Some clients who approach us to improve their position in Google searches are doing so because their existing sites are set up in a non-SEO-friendly way; others may be set up correctly but missing optimised content. Or, in an ideal situation, we will have coded the site ourselves with the intention of integrating effective SEO from the outset.

Buttonbag

This site was coded by Semlyen IT, and the SEO – both onsite and offsite – was provided as part of the original site development. The site, which sells craft kits for children, has done well for various search phrases. As a follow up, the site’s owners have commissioned an SEO boost in the form of some additional work for those phrases which are lagging behind. We keep track of how well each phrase is doing by logging the position of each in Google results every few weeks.
Read the rest of this entry »

Bookmark this post: