Following many years of successful trading online via eBay, Midlands Tool Supplies approached us to develop their new ecommerce website selling power tools, compressors and woodworking machinery.
Ajax web development
This particular project makes use of Ajax technology. This means when shopping online the site is capable of sending and receiving data from the server in the background, without interfering with the display and behaviour of the existing page.
Two good examples of this are the site’s search facility which provides instant results with a small thumbnail image and price as the user types in their query, as well as the ability to add multiple items to the basket without reloading the page.
Checkout process & payment gateway
Despite numerous ecommerce sites switching to a one step checkout process, research shows that new customers are more comfortable with a multi-step process. With this in mind, the Midlands Tool Supplies website features a new and improved multiple step checkout.
SagePay’s payment gateway is integrated directly with the checkout for complete transparency. The option to pay via PayPal is also provided using PayPal’s Express Checkout API.
Google Product Search
Google Product Search, formerly known as Froogle, is a price comparison service offered by Google. An automated XML feed means Midlands Tool Supplies products are featured directly on Google Shopping and new items are automatically included on a daily basis.
Google sitemap
An automated, dynamic Google sitemap means that each category and product page on the website is made available to Google as quickly as possible. The site also uses “Microdata” which consists of small snippets of information used to tell search engines what particular page elements are about.
Fast, reliable & standards compliant
As with previous project launches, the Midlands Tool Supplies site utilises CSS sprites. This is a method of making pages load faster by serving images in blocks rather than individually.
By following best practise guidelines throughout the development process, the site is fast and functional with a Google Page speed score of 95 out of 100. This demonstrates a number of our core principles which include writing efficient HTML markup, losslessly compressing images and other content, as well as tuning the site’s hosting environment for optimum performance.
Our quality control procedures ensured that the Midlands Tool Supplies site was tested and compatible in over 10 web browsers before its launch.
The above points are an example of our commitment to designing professional, high-quality websites that not only look fantastic, but can be considered “the cream of the crop” when it comes to their underlying construction.