Hardys Plants

About the Site

The site was originally a basic e-commerce site based on ASP. It ran from an MS Access database. The initial brief was to upgrade the sites appearance and improve performance. With this in mind the site programming began in ASP with the aim to reuse some of the old code. It quickly became apparent that this would not be an option and the old code was left. To reduce impact on the projects time the programming continued in ASP. The site was linked the Barclays ePDQ payment gateway. This moved all the payment details away from the site. This reduced the risk level for the company and made PCI compliancy easier to attain.

Design

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The customer provided the logo, this was to become the basis for the selection of colours.  Using this logo and some instructions from the customer various designs were created.  The final design was created by combining elements from these designs that the customer liked.

Click on the image to the left to see a slide show of some of the site designs. ( When the large image appears click on the right or the left of the image to move to the next or previous image. )

The Build & Function

The site has full content management allowing text to be edited, main pages to added and removed as needed.  The news section has its own admin to make it easy to add and remove articles.  The news section also allows users to sign up to the newsletter.  These email addresses are exported as a CSV which is used to for mass mailing.  The data export also includes a link to let users unsubscribe from the newsletter via the website.

Part of the initial brief was to ensure that all existing plants currently in the system be transferred in to the new database. ( This was about 1500 different plants! )  To achieve this the data was exported from MS Access as an SQL file.  This was modified to match the data structure of the new site.  Along with the data all of the images were also copied across.

The key purpose of the site is sell plants.  To aid this process the plants are split into the Genuses.  In addition to this categorisation each plant has many properties which are entered in the admin tool.  These include items such as Colour / Size / Season of Interest / Species / Award of Garden Merit (AGM).  This allow users to find plants by selected the properties they want from the plants.

Due to plants being a seasonal product the site show if products are in stock and when they are available.

In addition to selling plants Hardys also sells other products, a separate admin area was created to cater for these items.  The main reason for this that normal products do not need the large number of database entries that plants require.  For normal products categories are manually created and can include sub categories.

The site has a mini basket which is always visible, this helps to keep track of selected items.  The mini basket allow items to be removed.  To alter quantities or make large changes the full basket can be used.

Once an order has been assembled and the user click to go to the check out they are redirected to an SSL server.  The SSL server provides data encryption for all data entered from this point on.  The user either logs in with an existing account or creates a new account, from the the card/delivery address details are added.  When the order is confirmed the user is redirected the Barclays ePDQ payment gateway.  The key order information is passed on as well as the card address for the customer, this reduces the amount of data enter a user need to do.  The information is encrypted before being sent.

Once the order is complete Barclays ePDQ send a confirmation along with details of the transaction to a secure folder on the hardys site.  When this is received confirmation e-mails are sent to the user & Hardys.

Hardys can log in at anytime to view new orders, change order status as the orders are progressed.