Conservatory Furniture Web Design — CPS Furniture Case Study

The fourth website we have built for a Gloucestershire furniture retailer trading since 1971 — and the one that finally got them off Magento.

About CPS Furniture

CPS Furniture was established in 1971 and started as an antique furniture export business in Dursley, Gloucestershire, exporting to America, Australia and Europe. In 1988 the success of CPS required a move to larger premises at Merretts Mill Industrial Estate, Woodchester, near Nailsworth, where a factory and showroom were established.

In 2011 CPS started selling directly to the public from the showroom and via the internet, taking orders both locally and nationwide. In 2015 Pauline and Graham took the decision to retire after 44 years in the furniture business, leaving the company to be run by their son Gary.

CPS Furniture have been a client of Mediatopia for nearly ten years. This site is the fourth design we have created for them, and we keep the site up to date with the latest features, design modifications and search-engine friendly coding to make sure it ranks well and serves their customers properly.

Why we moved CPS off Magento

The previous CPS Furniture website we built in Magento. The amount of time we spent upgrading plugins, and hacking plugins around so the site would work the way we wanted, was a great deal of trouble for us and for the client — time that was being paid for but was not producing anything the customer could see.

That is the hidden cost of platform e-commerce that nobody quotes for. The licence is cheap or free, the theme is a few hundred pounds, and then every upgrade breaks something. You end up paying a developer to maintain compatibility between components that were never designed to work together.

We had recently finished developing a large part of our own content management system, WebGuru, and decided to build the new site on that instead. It gave us a far more hands-on role in the design and development, and it removed the entire category of problem the client had been paying for. The new site is fully responsive and we paid much more attention to the design styling to give it a luxury feel.

What a furniture retail website has to do

Furniture is bought on appearance and reassurance, in that order. The photography has to make someone want the piece, and then the page has to answer the practical questions — dimensions, materials, delivery, lead time — before they will commit to a purchase they cannot sit on first.

For a showroom with a national online arm, that means every product needs a proper page rather than a line in a catalogue. It is more work up front, but it is the only way to rank for the specific searches people actually make, and it is how e-commerce converts rather than just displaying stock.

If you run a furniture showroom, conservatory or interiors business and your site is fighting you rather than helping, that is exactly the work. The Sarah Jane Kitchens case study is a comparable project where the photography carries the sale.

Need a website for your furniture showroom?

Tell me what you need and I will give you a fixed price. You deal with the person who builds it — not an account manager, not an offshore team.