Shandy Hall in Coxwold, North Yorkshire, was the home of 18th Century vicar, novelist and celebrity Laurence Sterne. It is now a public museum, housing a collection of his work. It also incorporates a gift shop, garden, and the beginnings of Asterisk*, which, when fully-fledged, will be a workshop space for artists, writers and technologists.

The website developed by Semlyen IT for the Laurence Sterne Trust features an online shopping cart enabling site visitors to purchase items from the Shandy Hall shop. As well as physical items, they can also buy Shandy Hall membership packages from the website. The site also features alongside the shopping cart, a bespoke events and exhibitions management system.

This site was designed by Bivouac.

EMDR Extra

This is a brochure site for EMDR Extra, an organisation offering training workshops to mental health practitioners working with psychological trauma. EMDR is a technique used to treat conditions resulting from trauma, such as Post Traumatic Stress Disorder.

The site features an online application and booking form, which includes payment processing by PayPal.

This site was designed by Jamie at Semlyen IT.

McCartney Lettings

York letting agents McCartney Lettings commissioned this new property management site, which integrates a bespoke property details administration system. McCartney Lettings are a new agent and their new website will help attract the attention of more landlords.

Designed by Andy at Semlyen IT.

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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.

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We’ve been working for some time with Get Cycling – nationally renowned cycling promoters and purveyors of all manner of pedal-powered fun. We also took on the task of developing a site for their sister company, Company of Cyclists.

The site was launched last week: Cyclorama – a guide to all things pedal-powered. It’s an ambitious project, an online bicycle (/tricycle/quadricycle…) exhibition featuring high-quality specialist cycle manufacturers and retailers worldwide, backed up with the results of a lifetime of work in bicycle journalism. If you like bikes – and I do – you’ll probably love it.

The site is being launched in stages – right now you can read over 250 articles, essays and technical guides in the bike culture section. Over the next few months we’ll see the exhibits appear: the retailers, manufacturers and bikes on exhibition, as well as blogs, discussion boards and an online shop.

The site has been coded to be entirely multilingual, so that exhibitors can upload their profiles in their own languages, and in as many of them as they like. Translations are being added to the existing site.

That’s one of the complications of the site: the other big one has been not getting absorbed in reading all the articles!

The Cyclorama Homepage

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A few weeks later, on September 6th, is York Green Festival, again held in Rowntree Park. Having grown enormously since its launch just two years ago, the Green Festival features live music, DJs, stalls, speakers, various workshops and children’s activities.

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