Overview
The owner of The Grape Store, John Lees, initially came to TKStarley for website maintenance. As soon as we began work, we saw the potential the site had, especially since John was truly passionate about the products he stocked. We had tonnes of ideas on how we could improve the site in terms of both front and back-end usability, and John was really receptive to the concept we put forth.
Solution
We knew we had to create an ecommerce site that would appeal to John’s current customers, who were highly knowledgeable about wine themselves and wanted to browse by region and grape type. However, we also wanted to cater to the everyman shopper, who perhaps wasn’t as intimate with the intricacies and nuances of the different wines on offer. In order to fully understand the needs of each potential customer, we developed in-depth user profiles to ensure the site we were designing would appeal to everyone who used it. As the user profiles were quite varied and contained both wine connoisseur and inexperienced browser, we crafted a filtering system that would enable shoppers to be as targeted or as they wished when using the site.
At TKStarley, we put a lot of focus on user experience. After all, customers make a business, especially with an ecommerce website, so it makes sense to us to craft our work around the user. This attitude drove us to implement a plethora of custom features designed with the customer in mind. From advanced wishlists and customer account areas to advice and recipes in the blog, we’ve created a site that supports, educates and informs the customer as well as selling to them.
Like many of our projects, The Grape Store’s new website is built on WordPress, and WooCommerce powers the online shop. We use WordPress largely because of how versatile it is – we can write custom code for each project, and it’s really easy for our clients to use. The WooCommerce plugin is an incredibly secure ecommerce module that’s just as developer-friendly as WordPress, and allows for a great deal of customisation. By building The Grape Store on this solid base, we were able to produce an incredibly powerful and high-performing site which offered a great deal of functionality and flexibility for both front and back-end users.
We also built this site with the future in mind. We take time to get to know our clients, and therefore really want their businesses to succeed – The Grape Store was no exception to this. Therefore, the site is completely optimised to rank as highly as possible in search engine results, and we went through every single page and product with a fine-tooth comb to ensure the content was of the highest quality possible. We consider ourselves to be a highly ethical company, and only use honest, ‘white hat’ SEO methods, which will future-proof The Grape Store against algorithmic search engine updates designed to crack down on poor quality or ‘spammy’ sites.
We’re really pleased that The Grape Store appreciated our work, and have signed up to our marketing services. We’ll be managing the company’s social media presence and working on ongoing SEO efforts, and we’ll also continue to maintain and update the site. Since launching the site in August, sales and conversions have already increased significantly, and we expect to see this pattern continue exponentially as we work on marketing the brand. We’re genuinely proud of the site we’ve created, and look forward to helping John and the rest of the team achieve success.
Visit The Grape Store to check out our work – and why not treat yourself while you’re there? New customers can enjoy 10% off with the code TGS10.
If you’re interested in an ecommerce website from TKStarley, head over to our services section to learn more, or visit our contact page to get in touch.