Aspden IT

Teign Music Redevelopment

Wednesday, 04 February 2009 08:05

Case Studies

Since the initial development of a 'front of house' branded website and a customised OScommerce webcart for Teignmusic, the web has grown and matured, as has their business.

The original site facilitated their needs but they wanted to make more of a statement. Their frontpage had to have more than static content, it had to bring live product feeds to the visitor straight away and deliver a fresh look and feel. Teignmouth is a close knit, vibrant town with a lot of local bands. Teignmusic is at the heart of that, and their site needed to reflect that. At the same time, their business reaches all parts of the country due to their large range and 

Luckily they still retain all their original development files and artwork which was developed by Aspden IT, so we were able to extract all content easily and start to prototype their site redevelopment.

With the CS4 toolset at our disposal and our expertise with Flash, Dreamweaver and photoshop we were able to build some quick slideshows, mockups and banner ideas, which allowed the team then to really explore where they wanted to go. With such tools as screen sharing we were able to interact with them in realtime in some cases.

With our adoption of prototypejs and scriptaculous libraries we can build very responsive and interactive widgets on the site. A news ticker was thrown together, and we built some interactive rollovers using Event.observe which not only looked great but also added more spider friendly content. Firebug was used extensively to tune site performance and continues to be developed.

Their SEO update is due to the fact we are adapting their standard 'content' to shine as well as their products do; these are provided as datafeeds which get searched in a different way by google, often resulting in multiple SERPs. For some products, with competitive pricing we can get two links above the No1 search rank even if we don't rank high for the actual search.

For their content management we have intergrated XML feed reading capability from their blog service, allowing any of the staff to edit and maintain the site and have trained them in updating their product catalogue. Twitter and other services allows their site to be changedevery minute from wherever.

Custom MySQL queries pull random, related and special offer products from their ever expanding product ranges. This underlying knowledge of oscommerce and tricks enable us to blend the cart system better allowing for fewer clicks to purchase.

The javascript utilises the Google.com Content Delivery Network meaning the page benefits from caching and compression of the javascript.

 We continue to work with the team building auction functionality, POS information screens and youtube video tutorial, the later we hope to launch in March.

 Peter Williams, the director at Teignmusic in Teignmouth commented: 'Not only do we get IT support and indepth technical ability, we get a wealth of experience in delivering a business over the web. Aspden IT has worked as part of our team during our incubation and startup and continues to be invaluable.'

Aspden IT can design and program your website with a skilled team of mysql specialists, php developers and designers. What is more we are able to consult and develop your IT infrastructure at the same time.

Our flexible business models also attracted Teignmusic: 'We pay a retainer for their services and we can save this up so that our larger projects can benefit from some initial prototyping, or we can get incremental changes along with IT support on a site visit.'

 Teignmusic monitor their site with google analytics reports and custom goals. They continue to see a 10% month on month increase in site visitors and build their customer base by 5% a month, which is double the standard ecommerce site.