Professional Website For DIY Business
Project Brief
Gimme Media were approached by Valley DIY and Building Supplies as their previous website builder and host had taken their website offline without any warning - affecting not just the website but emails for the business. Time was of the essence with this project. No existing content was available to work from so all content had to be re-written from scratch. All photography would also have to be taken - with the range of products, stock photography wasn't really an option. The only thing we had, was a small logo of fairly substandard quality - so we had to recreate this as well.
Deadline
Three weeks from initial meeting to website going live.
Conceptual Design Samples
Challenges
The first challenge was getting hold of the three domain names that were with the old host. As communication had broken down with this company, it was decided to go straight to Nominet and get the domains rescued that way. Whilst it incurred a small charge, it was by far the quickest and least painful method of getting all three domains onto our servers. This in total took five days for everything to propogate.
While the domain names were being transferred, we took a trip over to Stocksbridge to take photographs and get a feel for the business and the owners. Products lines were established as were the main areas of the business (six in total). This was done over a full day.
The next stage was to produce the website content. Establishing keywords and key phrases based around the six core areas of the business was first on our agenda, looking at national and local search trends before making our decision. Once this was done, the content was written with these in mind.
The photography we had taken, was then edited, resized all ready for placing on the website. Certain key images were touched up using Photoshop. One or two stock images were used for certain product lines that were out of stock at the time, but on the whole, we tried to use actual photos taken at the business.
With all of these bits now in place, and the domains within our control, it was a case of inserting into the website, setting up the SEO bits, creating the email addresses and testing.
Total time taken from initial contact to a live website was three weeks (this included 5 days where we were waiting for the domain).
Skills
Clients Thanks
Toby pulled us out of a very big hole when we had been let down badly with our previous website company. Outstanding service, very proficient and a pleasure to deal with. We will be using Toby and his company from now on without a shadow of doubt.
Ray Horton - Valley DIY & Building Supplies