A few years ago I was asked to look into building a web site for a local garden buildings company,
Summer Garden Buildings, who sold conservatories, sheds,
summer houses and so on. At that time they had four show centres in the East Anglia region and all
of their sales were through these.
The initial site was just a showcase for the products they sold but raised their profile in the online world and sales started to be made because people found them via the web site. Later on, proper e-commerce facilities were added to the site (which was built with this in mind from the outset).
The system selected was Protx - I had previously set up PayPal for one client and also attempted to get to grips with another e-commerce system from the HSBC bank. PayPal was relatively simple, although biased towards the US market, however the HSBC system was far from easy to either understand or set up - I came across several online forums where people were asking how to get the system running and, obviously, not getting much help. The Protx system turned out to be much more user-friendly and had two useful testing levels which meant that, as a programmer, I had far more confidence about the live running of the system before it actually went live.
Since implementing the e-commerce section, the company has gone from one that, by necessity, was restricted to sales only in the regions where it had its show centres, to one that now has national sales and delivers to all areas of England, Scotland and Wales. Additionally, with constant 'tweaking' of the site, their Google ranking is now usually in the top 20 and often the top 10.
One early addition was to have an alternate site, www.summerconservatories.co.uk, which displayed items in a slightly different way such as with the original manufacturers brands. This was implemented by pointing both domain names to the same physical hosting. By checking the domain name requested by the customer the appropriate content could be displayed. This checking was "hard-coded" (i.e. built into the main PHP code that runs the site).
In 2007 it was decided to take this idea even further as they wanted to diversify into other areas such as selling swimming pools, hot tubs, garden furniture and gazebos etc. A revamp of the site gave them the ability to point newly bought domains at the existing hosting and set up the site content themselves quite simply via the back-end administration. They have now created over 20 "sub-sites" which are dedicated to specific categories of garden building or equipment.
Here is a (by no means complete) list:
- Swimming Pools (branded) - www.summerswimmingpools.com
- Garages (branded) - www.summergarages.com
- Log Cabins (unbranded) - www.summerlogcabins.co.uk
- Greenhouses (branded) - www.summergreenhouses.com
- Garden Offices (unbranded) - www.summergardenoffices.co.uk
- Alternate Main Site (branded) - www.summerconservatories.co.uk
- Hot Tubs and Spas (unbranded) - www.summerhottubs.co.uk
- Childrens' Playhouses (branded) - www.summerplayhouses.com
- Summerhouses (branded) - www.summergardensummerhouses.com
- Cane Furniture (branded) - www.summercanefurniture.com
- Garden Offices (branded) - www.summergardenoffices.com
- Conservatories (unbranded) - www.summerconservatories.com
- Garden Furniture (unbranded) - www.summergardenfurniture.co.uk
- Garden Sheds (unbranded) - www.summergardensheds.co.uk
- Gazebos (unbranded) - www.summergazebos.co.uk
- Main Summer Garden Buildings Site (unbranded) - www.summergardenbuildings.co.uk
- Childrens' Playhouses (unbranded) - www.summerplayhouses.co.uk
For more about this multi-site hosting and other web technologies see the Web Technology page.
