Personalised Charity Christmas Cards From The Card Company

The Card Company has been supplying Personalised Charity Christmas Cards to businesses within the UK since 1999. In this time, they have grown to become one of the top three independent suppliers of Christmas cards. Their business clients include many well-known household names that return year on year for their Corporate Christmas cards.

The Website Design

A design was required that showed their high quality cards off to the maximum. A white background was ruled out because the cards seemed to disappear into the page so we tried many shades of dark colours, including black, before it was decided that dark grey was the one.

Technical Considerations

In the personalised Charity Christmas card market, clients are encouraged to request free card samples before purchasing to ensure that a particular card design meets with their approval before final ordering. These free sample requests must have a maximum and unique limit.
We designed a system that allowed a website visitor to add card designs to their basket but would not allow multiples of the same card design. The basket allows a visitor to add as many unique card designs as they like, but will only allow them to finally order their favourite six.
If a visitor does not wish to order right away, they can register and store the items for later retrieval. If the visitor returns and adds more items to their basket and then logs into their account, the system merges the two baskets together.

Navigation

For the navigation, it was important that the visitor was never more than two clicks away from a card design. It was also important that a visitor had more than one way to get to the designs so we incorporated Browse All Card Categories, Cards by Price Band, a search facility and a slideshow system in Flash.

Search Engines

As always, we are mindful of search engines when designing and building any website and for this reason our brief was to include the following:

• Text links for all navigation
• A minimum of tables for layout - 95% of the layout was completed without using tables
• XHTML 1.0 Transitional compliancy
• A sitemap system
• Different text on every card page - as opposed to just a product name and code
• No query strings in page addresses - each page is unique

Visit The Card Company Website at www.card-company.co.uk

Website design uk

Tel: 029 20555509