About Gardening Naturally
Based in Cirencester, Gloucestershire, Gardening Naturally are a family owned business who se goal is to help gardeners, experienced or novice, to grow their crops free from insect damage with their pest protection products.
Gardening Naturally offer a large range of garden netting, butterfly, bird and insect netting. They also offer products such as garden fleece, insect traps and barriers, vegetable cages and products to help you the gardener to plant, grow and harvest your crops.
Project Detail
Through search engine researching, Centurius were contacted by Gardening Naturally for an initial chat about the possible redevelopment of their existing web site. The client outlined the current issues that the site was experiencing as well as the possible improvements that they would like implemented. As well as this there were also existing coding elements which were required to be kept for functionality.
Centurius then put together some recommendations for the site as well as a quote for the work as well as possible project milestone dates for the build. A few weeks later Centurius were commissioned to carry out the redevelopment and restructure of the Gardening Naturally site within the client’s current version of Sellerdeck Business 2013.
Centurius carried out a design exercise which consisted of four flat visuals to illustrate the final solution to the client. These were presented online and through telephone conference, with the client the designs were tweaked and adapted to a point where design sign-off was approved.
There was a complete design overhaul to the site making the site larger in width, lighter in style with an alternative menu system for quick and easy navigation. Centurius also integrated a suitable google font family which gave the site a more eye catching look with larger fonts for ease of reading.
Gardening Naturally was built in HTML5 and CSS3. The core framework was developed for a responsive allowing for the site adapt its layout depending on the users chosen viewing device, whether laptop, tablet or mobile.
A number of functions were incorporated within the build to enhance the sites functionality. These included an enhanced jQuery homepage advertisement rotator to allow the client to highlight specific offers and allow the customer to navigate to key products more easily. The rotator also allowed for textual content to be implemented, thus over time, assisting with organic search listings. There was also the implementation of four homepage adverts, again with adding function of including a text title over it, which offered clear links for customers to reach key sections within the website.
The existing navigation was enhanced by implementing a new accordion style functionality which allowed Gardening Naturally’s extensive product range to be displayed more efficiently. This in the long run gave better user experience, getting the customer direct to the product. Improvements were also made with Sellerdeck’s new arrivals/best sellers functionality via a jQuery tabbed functionality, allowing more products to be displayed with less delay and administration.
There was a desire from the client to increase the visibility of the site and create links between website and customer. Centurius did this in a number of ways which included the implementation of social media links within the footer of the site so that customers can go straight to clients social media pages as well as the implementation of third party newsletter software which allows the customer to sign up to receive information and offers from Gardening Naturally. On top of this Centurius also implemented the 3rd party plugin addthis.com which allows customers to share the products across a number of popular social media site. This is turn can, over time, increase exposure to the site and help sale conversions.
From an SEO perspective additional variable were added and adapted to allow for a large section image, SEO friendly H1 header tag plus an area to display some introductory text for the section.
The product page layout was challenging as the client’s existing code allowing specific products with an extensive range of sizes to be displayed within a chosen number of columns. This functionality had to be adapted slightly, in conjunction with the new layout. Centurius implemented a third party plugin allowing for multiple images to be assigned to one product. As well as this Centurius also created a number of alternative layouts to accommodate for the various Gardening products that Gardening Naturally have on offer. In addition to this we also implemented a new jQuery tabber functionality which allows the client to break the content for the product down into tabbed information areas. Centurius customised the code to force specific tabs to appear throughout the entire catalogue for future use.
To summarise the project, Centurius were able to evolve the site to the next level allowing enhanced functionality which gives greater time efficiency when administering the site as well accommodating for the site to be viewed across multiple devices. The look and feel of the site now displays less clutter with greater focus given to the product catalogue through large image sizes as well as larger fonts for descriptions.
Testimonial
“I have to say I was absolutely dreading the website redesign process due to the previous one 4 years ago being a nightmare but wow what a different experience this was!
Design exactly as requested with just a few tweaks, communication fantastic, calls returned and emails responded too very quickly. Any minor problems were resolved usually within hours.
Everything ran pretty much to schedule as promised. We now have a much more professional looking website which functions exactly as we wanted it to. On top of this Centurius have made our website much easier to manage and control due to additional features which are now included within the website and it’s software.
We got exactly what we asked for plus a nice surprise we were not expecting, it was responsive too!
We have had great feedback from our customers on the new design and how much easier the website is to use. To top it all off our sales are up significantly!
Thank you Centurius”
Julie Brandreth – Director
Gardening Naturally Limited
