A new website for Stanley John Ltd

We’ve just finished a new e-commerce website for Newbury-based Stanley John Ltd, suppliers of drainage and related construction products to the groundwork and civil engineering industry. This is our second site launch in two days – our Autumn is looking busy.

We’ve worked with Stanley John (SJL) for several years and had created the first version of their website back in 2018 – a brochure-based site which allows visitors to browse an online version of their catalogue, but not make purchases.

Heading into 2024, SJL wanted an updated website with a new look-and-feel, together with an e-shop that would allow people to order products.

Other features, such as a trade application web form and a downloadable PDF brochure, transferred over from the old website.

Recommending WordPress and WooCommerce as our platforms of choice for e-commerce websites, we started by developing a wireframe for desktop and mobile, mainly to ensure that visitors could easily move between the expected large number of product categories on devices with smaller viewports.

Wireframing

We spent a lot of time working on the mobile wireframe, producing designs which we could test on real devices with real people. Data suggests that in the last two years alone, around 60% of all web-based purchases are completed on mobile. So we knew our m-commerce solution needed to be simple and usable. This is particularly important for engineers in the field who needed to quickly place an order for a component or replacement part. SJL have both breadth and depth in their product catalogue. They have a large number of products in a wide range of categories. Allowing people to quickly find what they were looking for was important.

Usability testing with real users was crucial here as well. We were able to suggest a couple of options which we then placed in front of a focus group. We then took the one which most people preferred, refined it and tested again. That allowed us to come up with both an effective mobile and desktop e-commerce solution for the shop.

Our blog post on why we love wireframes and prototypes is an interesting read if you want to know more about our prototyping process.

Design & launch

From there, we created a bespoke design for the site, hand-built the template files and set up the e-shop. Staff at Stanley John then set about populating a CSV data file with information about all of the products available which we then uploaded into the store.

The intuitive WordPress Content Management System (CMS), coupled with our intuitive editing templates, means the staff at SJL are in complete control of their content and e-shop. We wish them every success for continued online (and offline) growth.

Have a look at their site and see what you think.

And if you would like to discuss having a new website, do please get in touch – we’d be delighted to hear from you.