Sonet Journal

A recent build in its completion of the first phase is the Packaging Machines website for Marden Edwards Ltd.

We fully developed the entire solution for the site to meet specific criteria. Firstly Marden Edwards manufacture and design packaging and overwrapping machines. Secondly. they have been in the business for many years and are at the forefront of their industry.

In past years websites that sell, provide information, within the industrial sector are for the most part usually dull affairs with white or blue backgrounds with ‘cut-outs’ of machinery or other industrial ware and a few words of text. It is quite rare that the owners of the sites or webmasters have been prepared to offer something more visually appealing and interesting, maybe feeling that potential customers will not care about design and pick up the phone and call them anyhow.

Thankfully this attitude is beginning to change, people do care what they see and they do read information especially if they are going to be forking out money to make a purchase. The directors at Marden Edwards understand this. They also understand that keeping up with new technologies that include design and coding plays an essential part towards online success.

Southbourne Internet designed the Marden Edwards website to be clean and easy to navigate. Because ME manufacture machinery and are largely involved in the packaging industry we wanted something that reflected this. The boxes on the home page represent in some ways packaged boxes. Because of the companies strong involvement in the cosmetics industry we wanted to produce something that was clean and reflected the cosmetics rule for presentation of packaging. Another area was to keep the font clean and line spacing for easy reading.

Accessibility and Validation

The entire website has been built with no tables and validates to W3C standards of XHTML 1.0 we have taken steps to reach accessibility standards as much as possible.

SEO Refinement

The site is built to be SEO friendly and will be an ongoing development of the SEO strategies that includes natural search engine optimisation and a combination of PPC and online advertising. We optimised the structure for easy crawling to the all areas of the website. From the homepage a user can click on one of the markets boxes and immediately go to the full description of that market and follow on to the machinery area that provides details of their various overwrapping machines.

The site hopefully will set new standards for industrial websites that want to step away from the old designs and breathe some life into their sites. Building with the newer coding guidelines also offers future proofing for other technologies such as the mobile web.

Marden Edwards website is laocted at: www.mardenedwards.com

This entry was posted on Friday, October 6th, 2006 at 11:47 pm and is filed under Case Studies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.