Peter Brewer Goldsmith Ltd has been designing and handmaking jewellery from a shop in Falsgrave since 1986.
Being a chap, I tend not to hang around looking into jeweller's windows, and I'd never even noticed there is a jeweller in Falsgrave, so this project has been a bit of a revelation. I've started to get excited about jewellery.
Peter had not had a website before and was recommended to me by a consultant with our local Business Link. When I took Peter's initial call my first thought was to wonder how to differentiate one jeweller from another. So I asked Peter what his unique selling point was and it all poured out: he's a gemmologist and goldsmith with his own workshop and a range of unique jewellery. He's able to do all sorts of complex jewellery repairs and, for instance, can take an inherited ring and turn it into something else, earrings, a pendant or brooch.
It was when he described how he'd bought fresh irises for a few days running in order to work out how the petals and so on fit together so that he could create, in different coloured golds, an iris brooch for a client, that I thought "here's a chap after my own heart". And when I spent time in the shop, hearing the wealth of knowledge and experience that he delivers to almost everyone who enters .. I'm sold.
But there's a challenge here, for me. Being a developer of websites that adhere to standards and are reasonably accessible and usable, I'm often on the back foot when faced with a more visual designer. Our eyes are our most powerful sense and it's often difficult to see the problems (usability for starters) often associated with interesting visual designs. But I knew, here was a website that really had to work visually. If I did it right, it would be a nice showcase for me.
I had a look at the competition and none did what I felt I wanted. I wanted to really inspect the jewellery on offer, but none got close enough, detailed enough, for me. I really do think photography is important in persuading people to buy, so I took some test photographs at the shop using my existing camera and resolved that I needed a decent macro lens. Having acquired that, I wandered around town buying lots of white surfaces with different textures, and then experimented with lighting and reflections and surfaces and so on until I got it right, then spent a day with Peter working through his jewellery and photographing it.
Next up was the page design. Having taken great product shots, I really wanted to bring home the passion in jewellery. It's all about love and togetherness and specialness and looking at the gold and the jewels there's a real sense of timelessness (some of the close-up arrangements make me think of Henry VIII, for some reason and there's a celtic air about hand-bashed metal). But without pictures of people on the site, it could start to feel like a catalogue for washing machine parts. The site was designed, however, to make the pictures stand out, and putting the product shots and a shot of a couple cuddling on the same page made the eye flit between the two and actually we are wired to look at other humans so the wrong picture won. The solution was to use a small image at the top, knocking back the colours, and use a big picture knocked right back as a background to the text, with apologies to dyslexic people (who will find the text more difficult to read as a result).
The jewellery sites that are near the top of Google are multi-multi-page sites, so the multiple links to each page that that strategy creates seems to be a winning strategy. We didn't have the budget for a huge site, but started the process by having nine pages which are geared towards different aspects of the business and/or the sorts of search terms people enter into search engines: 'engagement rings', for instance.
In the end I think we have a very functional site: click one of the jewellery images, then press the 'play' button and you should get a randomised slideshow. It's not perfect, but it mostly works. The site also also looks good and it should play well with the search engines. I'm very chuffed overall, and the client seems chuffed too.
The site took just over a calendar month to complete, and 53 hours of actual work from my side, requiring an investment of just under £2,385 plus almost £100 of costs comprising two domains (.co.uk/.com), hosting and photo library fees.
The client said "the site is taking shape really well, I love it", "very pleased indeed" and when I asked for something more formal "John's marketing background has certainly been a great help, you get more than just a website. He really is interested in your project". All true :-)
Update 29 February 2008: I just took a look at the search engine results a few months after the launch. The budget was for a website, with nothing at all for Internet marketing, so in a sense this is accidental SEO, search engine positioning that's happened purely as a result of my awareness of keywords and keyphrases (OK I did a bit of analysis at first), of building standards-led websites, of naturally writing copy with a nod to keywords, and steering well clear of anything problematical.
Despite not being one of the mainstream jewellers in town, he's beaten only by one other jeweller for "Scarborough jeweller". But Scarborough's a small town, I'd expect to get good results for anything with 'scarborough' in it.
What's really interesting are nationwide search engine positions for things like "bespoke jewellery" (page four), and "unique jewellery design" (page one), where I imagined there would be thousands of craft jewellers who would make it their business to sell off the web.
So that happened almost accidentally. Imagine what would be possible if we actually tried.