Background
Neve’s Bees is a start-up based in Oxfordshire. The owner is a bee keeper who makes lip balms from the organic beeswax she collects from her hives. She has been selling the products successfully at markets and fairs but anticipates that the bulk of her business will be online, hence the need for an online shop that is both simple and effective.
Project
This project was another collaboration with Nikki from Designs Like These. Nikki designed the logo and packaging for Neve’s Bees before moving on to the design of the website. The client decided she wanted to use a WordPress theme for the site so the design was (mostly) tailored within the options offered by the theme. The selected theme incorporated the Woocommerce online shop software.
A professional photographer was employed to capture suitable images for the site. These have given the site a distinct ‘personality’ which fits very well with the overall branding of the products.
Apart from lips balms, the client has plans to offer other organic beeswax products in the near future and the site is set up to accommodate these other product categories. Importantly, it is also set up to make the fulfilment of orders as easy as possible. For any order, the client can click to print a delivery address label and an invoice on a single sheet of (special) paper making it very straightforward to package up orders. A smooth and straightforward system like this does not (surprisingly) come as standard and we spend some time ensuring that we met this requirement.
As with all of our projects, we went through a rigorous testing phase, checking page load speeds, appearance and functionality across a wide range of browsers, operating systems and devices. Older versions of these are included in our tests so we can be confident that the site looks good and works properly on the vast majority of devices currently in use. In this project, we paid particular attention to the checkout process to ensure we collected all the required data in the easiest possible way. Stripe was used to collect payments.
Outcome
The client now has a site that shows off her products on all device types, which is easy to use both for visitors and for herself. The site is set up for the expansion of her business into different product areas and for the tracking of her sales. It is simple for her to add new products, change prices, update stock levels and to publish new articles about her business.
Testimonial
I would highly recommend Roger. Roger initially created for us a simple yet attractive e-commerce website which worked perfectly and fit our budgets. As our business has grown and we’ve had more money to invest, Roger has been instrumental in developing our website. Roger also prepared a detailed report on how we could improve SEO for our website. We were able to make our budgets work to the maximum by actioning some of the (easier!) recommendations ourselves and factoring out the (harder!) ones to Roger. The result has been a significant increase in our organic web traffic. Roger also responds to our requests really quickly which I really appreciate - it helps me feel that we are truly supported and protected from an IT point of view.
Summary
Client
Neve's Bees
Our role
Development, testing and implementation