ABS approached Qwerty Design in the Winter of 2009 having been awarded a grant to create a new online ordering website for their retailers. ABS are distributors of Develop and Panasonic photocopiers and printers.
The original version of this website was designed and built by Qwerty Design but the front end has since been redesigned by a design agency called Five Talents to match their new branding. I personally preferred my original design but then I guess I would say that. Five Talents just provided a static mock up of how the re-branded site would look and I coded this into a template to add to the website.
The site was actually built around the shopping cart Storesprite. The developer I worked with on this Jonathan Hollin (no longer freelancing) had to write a lot of custom jQuery in order to meet the requirements of ABS. One of the main issues with Storesprite was its shopping basket.
With each purchase you were taken straight to the shopping basket ready to checkout. This didn’t work at all for ABS’ large range of consumables which are generally ordered in multiple quantities. Being taken to the shopping basket every time an item was added to cart just wasn’t feasible. Jonathan wrote a custom shopping basket using jQuery and AJAX that allowed for multiple items to be added with a single click without a page refresh. Upon launch the website was really well received by both ABS and their dealers. Storesprite also liked our improved shopping basket, so much so that they actually implemented something similar in a future release of their software.
The site is looking a little dated now and its not responsive but due to its technical nature I thought it very much justified its place in my portfolio.
