“Baltic Design have done an excellent job in helping I Saw It On The Box.com to become a well-known internet brand. Their design is classy, modern and exactly what the site needed. I would thoroughly recommend the services of Baltic Blog Design to anyone.” isawitonthebox.com

“Dan Cregin of Baltic Blog Design has done a great job on this theme. I particularly loved how he incorporated the strong theme of travel into his suggested designs. He was recommended to my by Kieron – whom (Dan) has done a fair bit of excellent work for.” affiliatestuff.co.uk

“Baltic Blog Design undertook the design and coding of our website Flybe Destinations. Using WordPress as the content management system BalticBlog Design  quickly and efficiently implemented our design brief.

The site required several elements of bespoke coding which was vital to ensure we were able to quickly create new pages and posts. Support and communication throughout the design process was excellent.

BalticBlog Design has also provided ongoing support to any changes we have requested. I would happily recommend their services to potential clients.”  flybe-destinations.co.uk

“Working with Dan was effortless. I often find it quite hard to explain what it is that I want, however Dan asked me all the right questions to find out what I needed. Works super fast and with excellent results, I’ve already booked Dan to design a second site!”  http://www.markboyd.co.uk/

“We sent Dan our text and some photos of our work and he had the site designed and built in less than two weeks! We loved the design and how he’d really understood the selling points of our company – even adding relevant stock images to add impact and clarify our message. The best part however was getting us linked into Google maps – we rely on local business and we’re ranking in the top 10 for “double glazing repairs” in a local search. Since we’ve had the site up and running the enquiries have been rolling in.” http://doubleglazingrepairsne.co.uk/

Magento Demo Store

While we can help develop and provide custom designs for a number of shopping carts, we would definitely recommend Magento as the best solution for developing your ecommerce site.

Magento is a remarkably flexible ecommerce platform that is trusted by world leading brands and while there is an Enterprise Edition available, aimed at large corporations; it has an open source version, the community edition that is probably the most popular shopping cart on the internet.

The community edition is generally all that is needed for most SME’s as it has enough power and versatility to get the job done form most online sales requirements straight out of the box.

Even better – as it is open source, many features that the community edition does not come with have been covered by independent developers and are available as free downloads or at a reasonable price. Localisation for the UK in the form of postcode finders and Royal Mail delivery matrices are all freely available, as are preferred UK payment gateway options such as Sage pay.

The main issues with many free open source and indeed retail shopping carts are generally similar, Magento has far too many great features to list here and it’s definitely worth checking out their site.
However here were the features we liked most:

Product Attributes and Variations

Product variations such as colour, size often pose a problem, even more so when price differences come into play with attributes such as weight and material. Many shopping carts simply don’t address this.

Let’s take the relatively simple example of t-shirt sales; with many carts you need to enter your product multiple times for each combination of colour and size. This is not ideal and wastes time for the shop keeper and also the customer, as they need to scroll through the many combinations to find the right size and colour they want.

With Magento, you can assign attributes and variations to a product with ease, adding a price increase or decrease if needed. The customer will see a dropdown menu for the attribute on the product page and the final price will update automatically with the customers selection.

Product Groups, Cross Sell and Upsell

You may want to sell PC components, but you may also want to have a “build your PC” option where you can group combinations of components together in certain ways; prevent or warn against the purchase of incompatible products, recommend complimentary products, or offer a discount with a specific group of products. This is all possible using magento community edition.

Price Matrices and Shipping

Often where shopping carts fall down is the area of shipping. When weight and size need to govern the shipping cost and when bulk order discounts and shipping distance come into play, the solution is often costly and in need of bespoke programming taking time to develop.

Using Magento can go a long way to solving many of these issues as modules for popular logistics companies such as Royal Mail, UPS and FedEx already exist to calculate shipping costs based on weight and distance. It is also possible to set pricing tiers for the value of the customer’s order.

Payment Gateways

Many small businesses don’t realise the complexities and potential cost that setting up online transactions involve. Security has become a very serious issue after many news stories of hacked databases with customers financial details stolen have been in the press there are many issues to consider.

The easiest way to sell online currently is with Paypal and also Google Checkout – these come integrated with Magento out of the box, as do many other great google apps such as analytics. You can set these up very quickly as long as you have Paypal and google accounts and you can be selling online on the day of publishing your site.

Many SME’s however feel the need to have a more professional checkout service and take credit cards directly on their site – there are many payment gateway providers providing this service such as Sagepay (Protx) Worldpay and Nochex. As Magento has a large community of developers, its often the case that the most popular gateways have modules to integrate them available for free or at cost effective price.

We connected a shopping site we had built to Sagepay – the module was freely available online. Many gateways require a lot of test transactions and verification before they can be deployed, often taking a week or two before going live. Sage pay can be set up in a matter of days with only one test transaction before going live. It worked like a charm and sage customer support were supportive friendly and helpful along the way.

How we can help

We can provide you with a unique design for your website and shopping cart to give your ecommerce site the professional look. We can design a look for even your administration section so your brand is continually reinforced even for staff.

As with other open source CMS, the software may be free, but technical knowledge of HTML, CSS JQuery and PHP are needed to extend and develop the software to tailor it to you needs. We have experience in modifying Magento to tailor the software to your exact needs.

Baby Deco is just a great idea all round – The main idea is for new parents and expecting mums to share their Nursery Room creations online by supplying a photo and links to any products they have used to create their special ‘look’.

The site also provides DIY tips, shopping guides and all manner of baby related articles to visitors.

Custom page designs dependent on category were needed to differentiate between article, product and nursery pages.

We chose to allow posts for individual products, so they could be categorised, tagged and have all the features of a wordpress post available to them. Products then can be “liked” on facebook, commented on and sorted in numerous ways, using custom fields for details such as pricing and affiliate links to the merchant.

Products needed to be associated with a particular nursery room and displayed on each nursery room page, we achieved this again using custom fields.

All these features alone make for a really interesting take on an affiliate blog that encourages social interaction and collaboration; A blog that becomes more than just a chronological list of “reviewed” products.

However our client wanted more. The site was to include thousands of related products, all provided by an XML feed from affiliate partners such as http://www.webgains.com/

Price Tapestry is a great way to turn your affiliate site into a ‘shopping portal’ where visitors can browse and compare thousands of products on your site before selecting their required product and being transported to the merchant where they can buy the product for a great price.

Price Tapestry has the power to act as your own ‘comparison’ site operating similar to bigger, well known sites. When an affiliate site addresses a niche market and also allows price comparison, web users can really benefit from visiting and find a great bargain in the process.

Integrating Price Tapestry with WordPress provides a great user experience, though it’s important to note that we do not fully integrate them as they remain separate pieces of software. The programs use separate databases and preferably are stored in separate folders but they both are “styled” to look identical or better – we just use one stylesheet for the design of both WordPress and PT.

It is perfectly possible however to pull information from Price Tapestry into WordPress and vice versa, allowing more visible integration such as displaying relevant products linked to a blog post.

With Baby Deco, products associated with each nursery were not guaranteed to be in affiliate feeds so Babydeco.co.uk has two sets of products: WordPress products for products associated with each Nursery, and a general product database provided by Price Tapestry.

This presented a few problems for categorisation and search which we solved by using re-directs so when a search term is entered the term is searched for in WordPress and then Price Tapestry.

http://babydeco.co.uk/

Coats.org.uk is a great example of a modern affiliate website. It focuses on a niche market, it has regularly updated and interesting content and has all the relevant social media integrated into the site including twitter and facebook widgets. It has a jquery “featured” carousel, which is becoming increasingly popular with many websites.

The only thing this site needed was an appropriate design, which we were glad to help with!

http://www.coats.org.uk

Martin from the NEC already had the right idea, he had built his company website using wordpress as a CMS and just needed a great theme design to make it pop.

Since the NEC provide events management and equipment for a massive range of party entertainment – from paintball and foam cannons to bouncy castles and rodeo – it was not hard to be inspired when coming up with design ideas for this site.

First we asked about the websites wide target market, as NEC’s services range from Stag and Student Events to Children’s parties, which would usually demand very different designs.

We then asked which sections of the market needed addressing most. From here we could focus the design on its target audience without alienating other potential customers.

After building the site we integrated it with a popular email marketing client, to allow Martin to create email campaigns around various products. We connected google maps and provided SEO advice which we will be following up on as his site develops.

http://national-entertainment.com/

Coastline is a great “chippy” on the coast of Blyth in the north east of England. Blyth’s coast has recently been redeveloped and it is looking great – the beaches are clean, the promenade is new, and there is always people windsurfing and jet skiing out at sea – so Coastline  adds to a nice day out at the beach with some quality fish and chips!

Because of this, we were very happy to build their website, and spent a sunny day taking photographs to use and get creative with the theme. We also did some custom coding as we feel this site could really develop into a community hub, and can benefit from adding local events and weather along with the expected content.

We really believe more small businesses should know about wordpress:

The great thing about using WordPress to get companies on the web, is that many of the usual five page static websites can’t be updated without more work from the web design company, costing extra money – some even charge a monthly fee.

Using a content management system (CMS) you log into for security, it’s not only easy to update the site, but it’s easy to link with social media such as Facebook and Twitter – these are great ways to connect a business website to its customers.

With WordPress, it is easy for a small business to update themselves without wading into HTML. Adding a post to WordPress is no harder than writing an email:

Coastline can update customers with business news, local events and any changes required to the menu are easily done.

WordPress has also has many “plug in” features that can add even greater functionality to your site:

We custom coded a widget that displays the local weather over Blyth, getting the data dynamically updated from Yahoo Weather. Customers can check the weather and the menu on the website before driving to the coast for fish and chips!

Finally WordPress is great for SEO, the way it is structured means your site is friendly to Google and other search engines. WP sites are indexed faster than many other sites and will start bringing you traffic to your business in no time at all:

We also linked Coastline’s website with Google maps so people searching for fish and chips in the area will be directed to the website, and people on the website can find out how to get there. Fantastic!