Newquay Camping and Leisure is a well established family business based in Newquay, Cornwall. Newquay’s popular mix of wonderful coastlines, spectacular beaches, beautiful scenery and great nightlife provides one of the UK’s leading holiday destinations attracting 1000’s of tourists each year.
With many families seeking more cost effective and UK based alternative holiday solutions, camping and touring equipment has seen a massive growth, and Newquay Camping & Leisure has led the way in the Southwest!
The Newquay Camping and Leisure store specialises in camping equipment, tents, caravanning and all camping accessories, it also stocks a wide range of outdoor clothing. In store you can find all the great brands from, Vango, Outwell, Coleman, Royal, MultiMat, Gelert, Easy Camp , Whale plus many more.
Their online store has been well established in the search rankings for the past 5 years, originally designed and built elsewhere IT-OK took on the maintenance and ongoing development around 3 years ago in that time have helped to improve the website’s Search Engine Optimisation and visitor experience.
After a bumper 2011 and an expansion at their high-street shop the time was right for a new facelift helping to cement Newquay Campings position not only in the South West but their growing national customer base. Damien Rowe, Newquay Camping’s driving force said;
“We needed a website to compete with the leading industry brands throughout the and deliver a much enhanced visitor experience. Our online sales have become a major factor in our business and we needed a website that would deliver our brand nationwide!”
Developing with ZenCart
The existing shop was built on the ZenCart ecommerce framework and the store contains over 1000 products so keeping the shops platform was essential in the brief. Zen Cart is an open-source online store management system, providing an ‘out of the box’ solution with everything needed to maintain an online store. Products, customers, pricing, payment and shipping, orders and more are managed by the store owner through the secure administration area. The shopping cart is set up to receive payments from major credit cards via the merchant’s choice of numerous available payment gateway services.
ZenCart comes with a few website themes to get you going and many websites built on this framework simply make minor adjustments to these website themes, such as changing colour and font, IT-OK however took a different approach! We wanted to develop a new site that lost all of those generic ZenCart looks, we designed a new website theme as if we were building the shop from scratch and although this provided quite a few challanges on-route we succeeded!
Enhanced Online Shopping Experience
The new website has a bold, dynamic new look. Taking the companies existing brand and giving it a new lease of life! The template contains a dramatic image wallpaper that resizes to the viewers browser width, this can be changed with ease and will provide an ongoing seasonal change to the website throughout the year. The home page has a new slick slider showing off latest offers and product categories.
We worked with Newquay Camping closely to re-structure the product categories into new user friendly drop down menu’s. These menu’s are also built dynamically so if the shop adds a new product range it will appear automatically.
We redefined the product pages presenting much clearer product information and technical specifications, also implementing a new image gallery to display alternative images of products.
Much work went into the shopping cart and checkout experience. Re-structuring ZenCarts somewhat long-winded generic cart into user friendly bite size steps. The checkout process of an online shop is essential to converting any online orders and consumers need to feel confident, secure and reassured throughout the process.
Damien Rowe finalised by stating,
“We are very proud of the new website, it is such a dramatic move onward from where we are. I feel the experience rivals if not betters the leading online stores in our industry, to have it in place and established before the new season will kick off what we hope will be our best year yet! However the work is not yet finished, we will be working with IT-OK on further online marketing and some new ideas too – sorry guys but there’s more to come!”
You can check out our website design for the new Newquay Camping & Leisure online shop here: www.newquaycampingshop.com