I was recommended to Basil and Julia of Tram29.com by Lauren from Décor Books.

Tram29 specialise in beautiful books containing a mixture of personal photographs taken by Basil himself together with reproductions of period ephemera.

Although an e-commerce website was already in place sales had been pretty poor, and the owner felt a bit let down.

When I first met Basil they were running a fairly expensive PPC (pay per click) campaign with Google to try and gather more sales – however this wasn’t working well. Although a healthy amount of traffic was reaching the website the website wasn’t converting the visitors into customers. Looking in depth at the campaign I could see that a very broad range of traffic was being targeted – so it really was a waste of money. I advised them to switch off the campaign immediately.

The first job with any e-commerce site is to get the site converting visitors into customers as well as you can – making the most of the traffic you currently have. You can then start to think about driving more traffic to the site – whether this is paid advertising (PPC), content marketing (SEO) or via social media channels (SMM).

The existing e-commerce website was using an off-the-shelf solution from Godaddy – but it didn’t really allow for displaying the interior pages of the book, and although an attempt had been made to get around this limitation it resulted in a confusing navigation structure.

I designed a new website, using WordPress as the content management system (CMS) with the e-commerce side of things handled by the WooCommerce plugin. This time around the product pages are a lot clearer, making it easy to flick though pages to get a realistic idea of the books contents. The whole site is an exercise in minimalism – helping to keep focus on the books.