Ecommerce Website Development: Really Wild Bird Food
The Really Wild Bird Food Co. is a family-owned business based in the picturesque Hampshire countryside. Husband and wife team Richard and Lesley Smith own and operate Street End Farm with the help of a small but dedicated team of employees, and it is here that most of their bird seeds are grown. The Really Wild Bird Food brand is built upon the company’s reputation for high-quality, home-grown British bird food, and Richard and Lesley emphasised from the beginning that these characteristics would need to shine through in their new website’s final design.
As online stores go, the new Really Wild Bird Food website is very well-stocked indeed – Street End Farm’s wide range of seeds and feeds is further bolstered by an enormous array of feeders, nesting boxes, squirrel guards, bird whistles, and countless other complementary accessories. In order to make this ecommerce website as user-friendly as possible, we had to think very carefully about the site’s structure and how best to divide this extensive variety of products into an intuitive hierarchy of categories and sub-categories. However, our hard work definitely paid off: the finished website is easy to navigate and use, and we feel that Street End Farm’s sunny, all-natural appeal shines through on every page.
Responsive Design
Roughly half of Really Wild Bird Food’s site traffic comes from portable devices such as tablets and smartphones, and so a key part of the design stage for this project was ensuring that the new online store would function just as well on mobile devices as on desktop browsers. Our design and development teams worked closely together to give the site a fluid responsive design that adapts (or ‘responds’) to the size of the screen you’re viewing it on - thus providing a flawless user experience every time!
Content Management System
With so many different products and categories to juggle – and new additions coming in on a regular basis – the Really Wild Bird Food team needed a back-end CMS (Content Management System) that would make it easy for staff to add and edit items at a moment’s notice. In addition to designing a user-friendly online store for customers to browse, we also developed a sleek admin console that only the site owners can access; not only does this enable quick and easy product management, it also allows the team to moderate customer reviews, set up special offers and promotions, and of course view all order details at the click of a mouse.
Telephone Orders
The Really Wild Bird Food team were conscious of the fact that online ordering is not necessarily everyone’s preferred purchasing method – indeed, many of their loyal customers prefer to place orders by telephone. In order to accommodate this, we built a telephone ordering system into the website itself: when taking orders over the phone, staff members can now use this special system put the transaction through the website and use their administrative privileges to bypass the payment stage.
