Creating a Splash in your Bathroom!

Bathstorm.com is a new business selling high quality contemporary and traditional bathroom suites and bathroom accessories from its showroom near Stamford in Lincolnshire. They are keen to develop their online presence and to compete with established bathroom suppliers on the net.
They had already created a website for themselves using an Actinic template, but recognised that this did not give them the professional appearance necessary to create trust in their brand as an online shop.

Bathstorm.com came to Chads Web Studio for help. We gave advice on how to optimise their website themselves and then redesigned the site to give a fresh, modern look to rival that of their main competitors.

We simplified their navigation system and added an imageshow of bathroom suites to show the quality of their products. We chose a bright, watery blue as the main colour, but kept everything else simple, using a white background to each page of the site, and a wet-look water-splash background to the outside of the website.

The prices and other highlighted text was changed from the rather angry red they were using to a more modern orange. Custom graphics were created for links to their "Price Match Promise", "Free Delivery", "Email a Friend" and "Help Centre".

Chads Web Studio also developed custom scripting to work out automatically discounts when the RRP ws entered and to display the resulting discounted price in orange, with the RRP price displayed in black but with a line scored through. This significantly reduced their work load when changing discounts on products.

The photographs for the "Best-selling items" and for "Special Offers" were enlarged and bespoke scripting applied to ensure that each of these images appeared at the same width and were cropped to display at a maximum height. This standardised the display of these products and neatened the overall look of the home page.

Learning to Love the Environment

CEES is the Environmental Education Service arm of Cambridgeshire County Council. It works in conjunction with Eco-Centres and Cambridgeshire Outdoors to help schools to bring learning about the environment to life.

CEES aims to encourage an understanding of sustainable lifestyles and to improve children's knowledge of the environment through first-hand experience.

CEES required a redesign for their existing website. They wanted a colourful website which would showcase their work and also provide extensive information on the various courses available to Cambridgeshire schools at its four centres based in Stibbington, Upware, Wisbech and Coldham. They also wanted to provide downloadable resources for teachers to use in the classroom.

Taking the existing CEES logo (which is blue and green) as a starting point, we created a design which suggests sky and earth, with a graded blue header and a grass footer. Drop-down CSS menus make all 30 pages accessible from the home page and also make them easily navigable by search engines.

The Courses for Every Class pages on the CEES website all contain tables of information specified by the site owner. These are all coded to meet W3C Accessibilty Standards.

The centres' pages all required several images, but had only a small amount of accompanying text. In order to display the images at a good size, we used a rotating fade-image show on each of these pages.

CEES also wished to be able to update one section of the website themselves: the CEES News, Views & Events page. For this we installed an online editor with a simple admin interface which permits the site owner to add text, tables and links themselves.

The website was created in Chads Web Studio near Stamford, Lincs