Website Launch – Manchester Motorhome Hire
This website has been lounging around in my Web Development Projects section for a few months now. Not that it wasn’t welcome, but it’s good to get it launched rather than wasting it’s life away in the safety of my server. Rather like a teenager needing a little shove to get it to go out into the real world and start working for a living, this website is now out there in the big scary web world.
If you fancy paying it a visit in it’s new home you can do so here – www.manchestermotorhomehire.co.uk.
It’s probably best to see the website in it’s native habitat, but if you would rather the ease of going to a zoo then you can always have a look at my web design portfolio page for this project. Here I will show you some lovely screen shots of the website and provide you with a shorter version of the discussion below:
Design
As with any web design project I began by doing a bit of research to checkout what other motorhome hire companies were doing with their website. I was looking for standard components that a customer might expect to see in the MMH website, and bits of the websites I knew I could do a better job of.
The client wanted a more modern feel to the website than a lot of the websites out there that he would be in direct competition with. Customers will form an opinion of a company based on their website. It’s often the customer’s first impression, and so it needs to be a good one. A clean, modern website would give the impression of clean, modern motorhomes. And of course the opposite is also true – a tired, old looking website might also give the impression of a tired, old product. As a result I chose a modern font, and put the content in semi-transparent boxes that “float” over a large background image.
The use of a large background image has become quite popular of the last year or two. However, it’s got to be the right background image. Firstly, it should be relevant to the website’s content. There would be little point using a cityscape as a backdrop to a motorhome hire company. People who hire motorhomes want to get out and about in the country. It’s also important to use an image that is interesting, but not so “busy” that it takes away and distracts from the content. Content after all is “king”.
In a similar vein of thought I have also used images of the Lake District throughout the site. Not only is it a camping and caravanning mecca, but it’s also in the same region as MMH.
Content
My client wanted me to use plenty of good photo’s of the motorhomes in the website. He felt that this was a good selling tool, and I have to agree. If you provide people with more information than your competitor, chances are they are going to call you first. You’ve already given them much of what they want. Again showing that content, whether it be text or images, is king.
Aside from the use of many photographs, I also had a lot of spec on each motorhome to contend with. Rather than having one long and laborious page for website visitors to wade through I have broken it down into more manageable chunks spread across several pages.
The price table proved a challenge. I found that many competitor sites had confusing and overly complex pricing seasons that were difficult to follow in table format. I found I had to constantly scroll to the top of the tables to check and double check I was looking at the right column. For those reasons we chose to make the seasons as simple as possible. I also added a visual representation in the form of calendars that pop-up when you hover over the dates at the top of the table.
As seems to be the norm these days, I put a contact form on the Contact page so that visitors can fire off a quick question without having to open their email programs. This is convenient and keeps them on the website, where they can then easily navigate to a new page.
A page of links to other websites is a great way of providing the customer with additional easy to reach information. This helps the customer, makes you look good, and can be used to ask the websites concerned for a reciprocal link – which will help your Search Engine ranking.
Structure
My client was keen that the website fill the screen. This leads to a flexible, fluid design that expands to fill large screens, and contracts to fit in smaller screens. I chose to make the minimum width of the site 960 pixels. Which is a pretty standard measurement, and fits nicely on screens that are 1024 pixels wide (the smallest screen width still in common usage). Fluid website designs lead to some interesting challenges. I wrote and article on it some months back which you can read if you want to know more.
Next, I decided to maximise the screen space by putting the navigation across the top. In order to split the content below up so that it wasn’t one solid block I chose to have a left column/box and a wider right column/box. On the left I put the page title and a brief introduction, along with any relevant contact information or important links to other pages. The bigger box on the right was to be the home of the actual content, if you like, of the page e.g. the price table, the images of the motorhomes etc. I found that this works really well, and you are able to provide a lot of content in this way, along with a secondary level of navigation.
As with the vast majority of the websites I design, you can reach almost any page from almost any page. This is aided by the drop-down menu under the Motorhomes link. The only exceptions to this rule are the motorhome spec pages, which, as I mentioned before, I have broken down into lots of smaller pages. As not all visitors will be interested in such detail giving the option from the relevant page is a better design choice than forcing people to read/wade through content they don’t care for.
Motorhome pictures are shown to website visitors in an interactive gallery (powered by the excellent JQuery library of javascript for those that want to know). Its an excellent way of getting a lot of images into a small space. Plus it’s more fun to use than scrolling endless downwards…
With every page I tried to keep the page length limited. This was partly because of the size of the background image, and partly because the vast amount of information is easier to digest this way. On a couple of pages it made more sense for me to put some information in a scrolling frame rather than split it across several pages. Have a look at the Extra’s & Upgrades page to see what I mean. I don’t strictly speaking like to do this, but in some situations it is the most appropriate decision to take.
Please do have a look at the finished product at www.manchestermotorhomehire.co.uk.
And you can always see more screen shots on my website portfolio pages.
DA
