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Mark Parkhouse Jewellers

The Brief

Mark Parkhouse is a well established and respected antique and jewellery shop in Barnstaple, Devon. They sell a wide range of new, vinatge and antique products but specialise in antique jewellery. They also offer a range of services such as jewellery repairs, customisations, valuations and engraving. Back in 2008 we designed and built a product catalogue with a content management system enabling them to upload new products as they came in to the shop.

As the use of the web grew, the site started to look outdated and the functional limitations became a problem to expanding their business online.

The Solution

In 2015, we met with Mark and his wife and business partner to discuss how they do business and what solutions we could offer through a more up-to-date website. An obvious request was to be able to sell products online directly through their website, but this raised many concerns about fraud and abuse as many of the items they sell are irreplaceable antiques and often worth thousands of pounds. Between us, we arrived at a solution that would enable customers to purchase lower priced items via online card transaction, but above a certain price, items could be purchased but had to be paid for by BACS, or coming into the shop.

We discussed many issues and found solutions for them all. We began by re-designing the whole website giving it a fresher, more modern look and making it more mobile friendly. Each page was mocked up, discussed and amended until everyone was happy. Then we moved to building the site using a combination of WordPress, WooCommerce, third party plugins and custom code to achieve all the requirements.

Once the new site was in use, Mark found there were several things that needed tweaking or adding to improve the experience for both the customer and for the administrator, so the site has seen multiple version changes since, the latest being the addition of an engraving section where the customer can choose to add engraving to specific products.

As with most improvements in technology, the owners are delighted with the results and wonder how they ever managed before.