Case Study

Kitchen Website Design — Sarah Jane Kitchens Case Study

A responsive rebuild for a Gloucestershire kitchen designer, built around showing the work.

ClientSarah Jane Kitchens

SectorKitchen Designers

LaunchedOctober 2017

PlatformWebGuru CMS

Sarah Jane Kitchens website designed and built by Mediatopia

Kitchen web design project info

Sarah Jane Kitchens can help you create your perfect kitchen and give it the facelift it deserves. Based in Gloucester, they carry hundreds of different kitchen styles from contemporary through to farmhouse.

Mediatopia contacted Sarah Jane Kitchens early in 2017 to create a new responsive website with a separate mobile site. SJK were already an existing client but were keen to upgrade. We set about redesigning the site around a full-width slideshow, so we could show how good the kitchens actually look, and built a dynamic search bar with a product tagging system so the many varieties can be searched and found quickly.

Why kitchen websites live or die on photography

Nobody buys a kitchen from a specification list. They buy it because they saw one they wanted, and that means the website is a gallery before it is anything else. Small thumbnails in a three-column grid do not sell a £15,000 kitchen; full-width imagery does.

The difficulty is that large photographs are heavy, and a slow site loses visitors before the pictures appear. Every image on the SJK site is optimised and served at the right size for the device, so the photography does its job without costing load speed. That is standard on every responsive site we build.

The second problem is findability. A showroom with hundreds of styles needs a way for someone to narrow down to shaker, handleless or in-frame without scrolling through everything. The product tagging system does that — each kitchen is tagged by style, finish and colour, and the search filters instantly.

Getting found for kitchen searches

Kitchen buyers search locally and specifically: “kitchen showroom Gloucester”, “shaker kitchens Cheltenham”, “handleless kitchens near me”. That means the site needs pages that match those searches rather than one gallery page trying to rank for everything.

It also means search engine optimisation matters more than for most sectors. A kitchen is a considered purchase with a long research phase, and people will visit a showroom they have already seen online three or four times before they walk in.

If you run a kitchen, bathroom or furniture showroom with a website that undersells the work, that is exactly the job. The Ston Easton hotel case study is a comparable project.

What We Built

Project development work carried out

Full-Width Slideshow

Large-format imagery on the homepage so the kitchens sell themselves, optimised so the page still loads fast.

Product Tagging & Search

A dynamic search bar with tagged products, so visitors can filter hundreds of kitchen styles down to the ones they want in seconds.

Responsive & Mobile Site

A responsive build plus a separate mobile site, so the gallery works whether someone is at a desk or on a phone in the showroom.

Common Questions

Kitchen Website Design FAQs

It depends on how many ranges you carry and whether you need filtering and search. A straightforward gallery site costs considerably less than one with tagged products and a configurator. You get a fixed price before any work starts.

Yes, and it is the best money you will spend on the project. A kitchen website is a shop window, and phone snaps of a showroom will undo good design. If you do not have a photographer we can recommend one.

Yes. We tag each kitchen by style, finish, colour or any other attribute that matters, then build the search around those tags so visitors narrow down instantly rather than scrolling.

It has to. Most people browsing kitchens are doing it on a sofa with a phone. We build mobile-first and test on real devices.

Yes. The site runs on our own content management system, so adding a new range, uploading photographs and tagging them is a routine job for your team rather than a developer request.