For over 100 years, FH Brundle has traded as a family business, firmly dedicated to strong service values. Back in late 19th century London, the company was founded to supply basic ironmongery, but a hundred years on, things had got a whole lot more complicated. Five major distribution centres in London, Birmingham, Nottingham, Southampton and Wigan now handle thousands of expanded metal, wrought iron, welded and woven wire mesh products, along with a huge variety of ancillary products to support the core ranges. Richard Brundle, the current proprietor, felt sure that this was the time to develop a website that would be really beneficial to the business, but it had to be practical, cost - effective and genuinely customer focused. The Creative Department were invited to manage the entire project, including original design and copy throughout.

Recognising the key features

Three of the key elements in the success of FH Brundle's business are ready stock availability, fast delivery and on - demand technical advice. As a result, we recognised that of all the features to be incorporated in the site design, three of the most important were an easy - to - use online 'Order Taker' for those customers clear about their requirements, an 'Ask Brundle' page for any technical queries and literature requests, plus a full listing of all products - categorised and fully coded - which would allow customers to browse all of the options available to them. This last feature represented a huge compilation task, involving thousands of items and was likely to both erode the available budget and delay the launch if not handled correctly. We resolved the problem by suggesting a shortcut, whereby an analysis of the latest sales data was undertaken, from which we could identify those 20% or so of products that represented the greatest bulk of sales. Once these were selected, it was possible to upload the information and stay on schedule.

As the site went live, the Brundle team continued inputting the remainder of the information for uploading soon after. Other material featured on this comprehensive site are contact details for each of the five distribution centres, including individual location maps, an introduction to the team at each branch and a detailed history of the company.

Once the remaining product listings were uploaded the project ran to over 60 pages in total and represents a genuinely cost - effective, user friendly, customer orientated website.

The Brundle website can be visited at www.fhbrundle.co.uk

Is your website really customer focused?

Contact Adrian Hargreaves: adrian@creative-department.com or Lucy Garrett: lucy@creative-department.com We can make sure that it is

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