Samarind helps furnish the web for JPH!
Background:
JPH Furniture Retail Warehouse was established by Mervyn Lloyd in 1989, with over ten years experience in the furniture industry. From the outset Mervyn’s goal was to build a company based on traditional values, supplying a mix of contemporary furniture and reproduction furniture and above all; good value for money and first class customer service, which is becoming something of a rarity these days!
Over the following 17 years JPH Furniture has built up an extensive and loyal customer base ranging from private individuals to national house builders, to private companies, and local council & government departments. By avoiding the trap of renting premises in a plush city centre shopping area (where overheads are high - meaning increased prices to compensate) JPH has prospered where others have often failed; simply by providing good value for money. Today JPH Furniture is based in an historic former RAF building in Deeside, Flintshire, just fifteen minutes away from the Wirral and Chester city centre, and easily accessible by a modern motorway and road network.
The Requirement:
Although the business is long established, Mervyn wanted to expand the customer base and looked at the most practicable method of doing so. After some deliberation, a decision was made to develop a new website that would demonstrate the quality and diversity of the JPH Furniture range. As experienced professionals in what is becoming an increasingly specialist industry, JPH felt it was essential that they continued to provide a personal service to their customers, offering good advice on both reproduction furniture and the more contemporary furniture ranges. This meant that they didn’t want an online shop, where the customer would not necessarily benefit from JPH’s expertise. Instead, JPH wanted a website that was flexible enough to demonstrate their extensive range of furniture to customers, whilst remaining very simple to use. It was also essential to generate new enquiries and encourage potential customers to visit the retail warehouse in Deeside.
The new website would be a key marketing tool that should establish a high profile on the major Internet search engines to bring in new potential customers. JPH Furniture’s catchment area mainly includes Cheshire, Wirral, Merseyside and north Wales. As the competition in the high street and out-of-town retail parks is ever increasing, JPH needed to demonstrate its value added services to attract new customers. The website was therefore an essential business tool with which to demonstrate their offering.
After discussing their needs with numerous companies, JPH commissioned Samarind to develop a new website. Samarind were given a clear brief to work from, which included, a ‘very simple to use’ design, that had the underlying sophistication to reproduce JPH’s range of furniture in a logical online catalogue, including good quality imagery. The site also needed to provide JPH with the flexibility to update the site themselves through a ‘user-friendly’ means.
The solution:
Samarind created a bespoke design which was then coded using XHTML and the latest CSS techniques. The design incorporated search engine optimization (SEO) techniques to ensure a high search engine ranking and a clearly structured site map, which was submitted to Google, with the aim of making it easier for Google to index the entire site. The results speak for themselves with the site being listed top in each of the targeted Google searches.
As JPH wanted the site to be accessible to ‘everyone’, Samarind ensured every page is compliant with W3C standards (including WAI and the Disability Discrimination Act 1995) before testing the site thoroughly with all web browsers including Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Opera.
Using contemporary development tools (ASP .NET) the site was developed from the ground up. At the back-end, a secure SQL database was developed to store all product information. At the front-end, a user-friendly administration panel provides access to add or amend ranges or products (including images) and their respective product descriptions and of course, prices!
The solution also encompassed a mail server for those business critical emails and a statistics engine for analyzing traffic to the site each month.
The Result:
The outcome is a very satisfying one; providing a greatly improved online shop window for JPH’s range of home and office furniture. Mervyn Lloyd, owner of JPH Furniture Retail Warehouse, comments: ‘We’re delighted with the website Samarind have built for us. It’s very stylish and professional, and truly reflects the quality of our products and services.’
‘We’ve had a magnificent response since it went live in August,’ confirmed Mervyn. ‘Samarind got us on the front page of the Google search engines and that has attracted plenty of new customers. They’re coming in to the warehouse because they have found us through the site, which is exactly what we wanted to achieve. Other customers are using the website to view the furniture and then make enquiries. Everyone I ask say they have found it easy to navigate and very user-friendly. ‘
‘Samarind did very well in interpreting what I wanted and putting it into action. I’m not techie at all myself; but the team listened to me carefully and they were very helpful in delivering the right product for me. You don’t always get that with people who work in IT!’
Samarind’s Phil Turner said: ‘JPH has been supplying furniture to the region for many years and we were pleased to be asked to help the company take this next step into its future. The new website provides JPH with a key marketing tool through which it can keep customers updated on a regular basis and increase the levels of sales enquiries as a result. It has been built with search engine optimisation and a fully (user) editable online catalogue to ensure the site always reflects JPH’s range, by being up-to-date. We wish Mervyn, Gareth and the team at JPH Furniture continued success in the future.’
To view the new website, visit
http://www.jphfurniture.co.uk/.
For more information about Samarind’s web development services, please contact Phil Turner or Matt Worrall on 01244 288281 or alternatively visit the Samarind website:
http://www.samarind.co.uk/web-ecommerce/default.aspx