Gordon Rigg approached Qwerty Design in summer 2013 wanting to replace their old e-commerce website that was no longer working for them on many levels. Gordon Rigg have three garden centres and are the largest in the North West.
Their existing website was awkward for the team at Gordon Rigg to edit and provided a poor experience to mobile users. As well as the store Gordon Rigg were also posting News Stories and Gardening Tips but these were falling under the radar and felt tacked on rather than a main focus.
Following a couple of meetings with the Gordon Rigg’s team we kicked off the project by creating a set of mood boards using the excellent Murally. Here we suggested the general look and feel, colour, typography etc. Having reached agreement we then created wireframes for each of the key pages within the store. Several iterations later we were able to begin coding the HTML templates. Murally proved to be a great way for us to communicate with the team at Gordon Rigg’s. It enabled them to log in whenever they liked to see what we had been up to without having to necessarily have a meeting.
We looked at a few options for the store but decided on the Open Source software Open Cart. This seemed to fulfil all of the clients requirements and proved to be easy to develop for. Rather than just copying the old website and having a Top Tips and Events sections we suggested to the team at Gordon Rigg that they might be better served by a full blown social hub. They liked the sound of this so we created a custom theme for them in WordPress to achieve this.
To find out more about how the social hub was created in WordPress please see this portfolio entry.
With the WordPress theme finished the only thing left to do was to teach the Gordon Rigg team how to work with the store and the hub. They had previous experience of WordPress so this was an easy task. Although this was a large project it went smoothly and the team at Gordon Rigg’s are very pleased with the results.
Jim Margetts was the web developer that worked with me on the Gordon Rigg website. We work together on quite a few projects and I would wholeheartedly recommend him. You can learn more about Jim by visiting his website www.jxsoftware.co.uk.
