01225 436109
01225 436109Thursday, January 5th, 2012
When The DiveZone wanted a new online shop, they knew where to come. We have been working with them for *ages* and have just finished their dedicated Kowalski Diving torch shop at http://www.kowalksi-uk.com.
They wanted a shop that carried over the look and feel of their corporate image and their existing website, yet at the same time looked like a shop and was clear and easy to use.
The DiveZone were happy with and very familiar with the ZenCart open source e-commerce software which we had used on Kowalski and we chose that as the platform for this site as well.
We designed site using a front page slider of featured products and a drop-down “mega” menu that allows you to get instantly to the product category you want. We also carried through The DiveZone main logo and the imagery in the background, but at the same time making the site light and clean to support displaying product images.
The DiveZone are very happy with their site. They have something that works, is easy to use and to which they can add their own stock and images easily ans imply. It’s also extendable in that you can add modules to increase functionality such as a MailChimp sign-up box or a Google base feed quickly and easily.
http://www.thedivezone.co.uk/shop
http://www.kowalski-uk.com
Thursday, March 11th, 2010
Setting up a fan page in Facebook is fairly easy, but keeping it populated and up-to-date can be time consuming. If you are already writing articles in your blog or news page and are using a modern CMS system like WordPress, then you can cross-post using your blogs RSS feed and import that in to Facebook.
The notes application is usually hidden off the end of the tab bar. Facebook keeps changing its UI so, you might have to hunt for it!
Aha! Now here comes the trickery. The”import a blog” link is elusive and doesn’t immediately show up. You need to click the “write a new note” button and then cancel it, then it will appear. Probably writing a new note will do the same thing, but the import button isn’t always there first time.
In WordPress and on most good browsers, the RSS feed is underneath the little orange button in the address bar at the top of your browser. Clicking it will display a formatted version of the feed and also give you the link to the feed. In this case http://www.ngbowen.com/feed
Go back to Facebook. Fill in the box, and tick the box that says you are entitled to use this feed. You are aren’t you? Then click on “Start Importing”.
Click the button. Nuff Said.
Now every time you post a new blog article that will also get fed through to your Facebook Business Page.
If you’ve got more than one blog, you can join the feeds up using Yahoo Pipes, you can also take a look at stats and set up a mailing list using Feedburner. While you are in the RSS feed take a look at Twitterfeed to push your blog out to Twitter as well.
Thursday, February 18th, 2010
Go-go Wear is a shop website for a range of sexy shoes and boots.
We were asked to make it clean clear and simple to use with a focus on the products themselves. We were also asked to come up with a logo and branding.
We decided to use ZenCart, the free Open Source shopping cart software. Zen Cart is fully featured and has lots of available add-ons. Plus it’s free, which is the best price!
We came up with a logo design and site design that we felt reflected the nature of the shoes. Quite often these shoes are sold with a range of other products like lingerie and we wanted a look and feel that separated us from that market, hence the groovy chick in a seventies stylee.
We also wanted to promote the site using a blog, rather than throw it all in together and risk losing the clean nature of the shop site, we added a separate WordPress based blog at blog.gogowear.co.uk and then linked to two together by putting RSS feeds from each site on to the other. (Something you have to use a third party feed manager for, in this case we used Feedburner).
We also set up a Facebook Fan Page at facebook.com/gogowear and a Twitter feed at twitter.com/gogowear and populated both with the RSS feed.
We really like this one. It’s simple, elegant and yet technically very clever with lots of integration going on behind the scenes. The shoes also rock !
