Marine Life Online

Marine Life LLP are one of the UK's best known marine aquarium specialists, based in Whitley Bay near Newcastle Upon Tyne. After 3 years of online activity they wanted to move their operations to the next level with particular emphasis on a graphically intensive site and a commercial focus on maximising the potential for online sales.

In a sector lacking in truly modern design techniques ClarityWEB were tasked with delivering a site that would sit at the top of its sector, visually represent the marine keeping hobby in all its colourful glory and draw users deeper into the site.

Having discussed a number of ideas with Marine Life, the site was designed with some unique features that encourage customer participation. The first comment most visitors pass is how much they adore the animated logo. The Marine Life mascot (a Moorish Idol fish) swims into view before settling in its static position, only to swim off again shortly afterwards.

The header of the site received a cropped version of a photograph taken by ClarityWEB of Marine Life's main display tank (well worth a visit just to look at it in amazement!) and this, along with the main navigation menu, remains a constant through the website.

Website Features

It's only you explore the Marine Life website that you begin to appreciate the features that have been included. They include a fully searchable shop with the ability to tag products by keywords that may be appropriate but not included in product titles or descriptions. Product category creation is entirely under the control of Marine Life, as you'd expected, but they can also determine the display order of categories and products within categories, decide whether items they stock are shown on the website or not - and change the status of such items at the click of a button.

However, a critical point throughout this was that no off-the-shelf shopping cart system was used. They can be cumbersome for people to learn, maintain and administer, so ClarityWEB adhered to our ethic of only delivering custom written Content Management Systems and Carts, putting all the power of a CMS in an easy to manage format that Marine Life were able to learn quickly.

The observant will notice the small details such as differing coral background colours depending on the page of the site you visit, the fact that the fish and coral images used on different pages vary and that even the most functionally standard pages, such as a contact page, have had careful design thought in terms of the images used.

The Customer Showcases section was developed as a new twist on testimonials, giving Marine Life the benefit of visually qualified testimony to their expertise whilst rewarding their customers with the opportunity to show their aquariums off and in doing so give visitors a glimpse into their experience and recommendations. The lower section of every Showcase also allows Marine Life to link directly to products in their online store that the customer has used in building their pride and joy.

The Services section is used to promote the extensive services that Marine Life offer that might otherwise go unknown to a new customer. Nearly every image on the site also allows the customer to view it in enlarged style by clicking on it, extending the visual experience beyond that of the shop products and encouraging visitors to spend time on the site.

The Galleries are unlimited in Albums and Marine Life can add new ones, caption each and every image they upload, amend or delete existing photographs and present yet another avenue through which to demonstrate their services and wares. For example, if a fish has been in stock in the past, but sold, Marine Life can upload it's photograph to an Album to show visitors of the livestock they're able to source - again encouraging the visitor to enquire as to the future availability of such items.

Advanced Homepage Features

Considerable work went into presenting a homepage that gives a visitor a swift gateway into various sections or specific products and brands, whilst giving Marine Life the chance to draw attention to Special Offers, Best Sellers and specified brands. The Special Offers section on the homepage allows them to include 8 direct product links with an image and brief description, showing the offer price.

The Best sellers section allows the same number of direct product links so a visitor can go straight to the most commonly sought after items without having to go into the shop, into categories or search for an item. The Brands section automatically takes the visitor to each and every product sold by Marine Life by a manufacturer.

It's features such as those above that make the site a stand-out example of how to enhance the visitor experience, promote services or products and do so with a very simple and easy to use administrative back-end in the form of the custom written Content Management System.

Content Management System

Behind the scenes maintenance has made a complex site an easy one to update. It also provides Marine Life with full order processing functionality. A secure area allows them to see pending or completed orders, administer user accounts, collate mailing lists for promotional purposes, print out delivery notes and invoices and control each and every element of the sites public face.

SEO

One of Marine Life's biggest complaints of their online experience prior to ClarityWEB was their lack of Google listings and online business. Thanks to a collosal amount of effort in understanding their business, they have immediately seen traffic increase - as well as their order intake. Indeed in the first 2 weeks after going live Marine Life received as many orders as they would normally receive in a month - and that was before Google finishing indexing well in excess of 500 site links from the ClarityWEB generated sitemap.

Within a week of going live they'd received Google No.1 position for 'marine fish for sale online', a Google first page listing for 'marine fish shops uk', the same for 'saltwater aquariums newcastle' and no less than 15 other Google first page listings. Furthermore these were all for highly searched terms - not for the easy to attain product specific terms that so many web design companies pass off as 'first page listings' (when in reality the search volume for very specific terms is so low they are virtually worthless).

What Marine Life said...

Jason Evans of Marine Life says "The site is everything we could have imagined and much more. The search listings we have seen already are well beyond our expectations and the site has attracted a lot of attention. Every order we received in the first two weeks was from new customers - people finding us on Google where we'd never seemed to have a presence before. Chris and his team have been quick to try to meet any request we've had, suggested a huge amount of ideas that have real business benefit that we would have never thought of, and nothing seems to much effort for them. Our old and new customers love the new website and it's a very exciting time indeed."

Chris Shaw of ClarityWEB said "Working with Marine Life was an absolute pleasure. No-one can fail to be impressed with the stock, services and sheer attention to detail that they offer. The site gives them a stable and advanced platform on which to maximise the sales potential they have always had - but that no-one really knew about."

In closing, Jason remarked "I couldn't recommend ClarityWEB highly enough. We'd started to lose faith in our online activities but this has completely changed our outlook. Everything we were told was possible has been proven right. I just wish we'd met them a long time ago!"

Visit Marine Life

If you want to buy a marine aquarium or simply view the Marine Life website to see what the final result looked like, click one of the links in this paragraph.