Project Description
Butterfly Print Ltd is one of the UK’s leading suppliers of design and print services to the education sector, and one of Picture Engine’s longest standing website design customers. Butterfly sells to schools in general, but especially to the early years sector (nurseries and childminders). The original brief for this site was simply to create an internet presence to make customers aware of the products and services available. The main objective – simply to get them to pick up the phone! All the company’s orders were handled via phone or email, with office staff logging the incoming orders and doing the picking and packing.
First steps
The original site was therefore a simple WordPress site with around a dozen pages, and SEO work to try and make sure that the site ranked highly for terms like “Early Years Printing” and “school printing”. This was especially important for their flagship product, a specialist “early years diary“. For all of those search terms the company remains on the front page of a Google search as of the time of writing, and the “early years diary” is the top result.
E-commerce
As the business grew it became apparent quite quickly that the model of offline order processing was becoming cumbersome and the client asked for a full e-commerce solution. We added the WooCommerce plugin to the site, linked it to the client’s Paypal account and set up a variety of shipping options. Initially we created around 20 products with a variety of size, quantity and/or colour options.
This has now grown to include things like school uniforms and reselling products from other suppliers (such as books) using affiliate links, to the point where the site now sells 70 base products. These come with a wide range of options such as size and colour for many of them.
Next Phase
The next stage in the site’s life is to add a new directory service, allowing subscribers to search a comprehensive list of sector-specific suppliers and receive special subscriber-only discounts from all the suppliers listed in the directory. As this project progresses there will be further updates and screenshots posted here, so watch this space!
We cannot recommend Picture Engine enough, having worked with them for over 6 years, from our initial website build to creating a full e-commerce shop which has transformed our business, Andrew and his team could not do enough for us. They are very knowledgeable and they made the whole process very straight forward. We also have continued, efficient support meaning we can just get on with the running of the business and they will deal with any web related issues for us. Reasonable rates and a fantastic service, what more can you ask for!
