Marram Gardens | Website Design
BJ Creative was tasked by James Owens to create a better web presence for his gardening and landscaping business. The main draw of the site is some of the truly breathtaking garden designs and heavy landscaping work. With garden design as the core of the business, being able to show previous examples of his work was key to engaging with potential customers. He has covered small gardens, large gardens, built custom lakes and managed festival sites. The new site was needed to explain the different aspects of his work and be able to show more examples of the work that he and his team can do.
Web Design
The website started as a blank canvas as there was no attachment to previous designs. So we started with a fantastic fullscreen galley right on the home page with the logo floating over the top. This design enables multiple large images to be used on each of the pages so that customers can see the work. We hid the navigation in a drop-down rather than having permanent visability, so that the page names were not confusing people.
Recommendations
The start of this project revolved around the SEO that BJ Creative could build into the site. James had not focused on this aspect of their previous site, but the new, although graphic, website has seen many search terms now appearing on the top 5 pages of Google whereas before, he was relying on word of mouth, which can be very strong for recommendations, but can limit the reach of your business. By adding specific pages relevant to his key searh terms, we have been able to make the site go from unlisted to highly prominent without spending on Google AdWords.
Several search terms now appear on the first page of Gooogle.
The Build
We built the site using ASP.NET 4.5. The new site was built in its entirety as a test site on a hidden domain so that the full functionality and cross-browser and cross-platform could be tested.
The site was initially hosted by BJ Creative on our server so that changes could be amended quickly at our end and this also then enabled us to managed the domains chosen for the website.
Skills used
Website design: Adobe Fireworks, Adobe Photoshop
Website Build: Adobe Dreamweaver, Microsoft Visual Studio
The website can be viewed at www.marramgardens.co.uk
Web design in Stamford
