Kyle Hadland

 

Passionate professional marketing consultant, web solution provider and photographer based in the Yarra Valley region of Victoria Australia.

Contact me: 0403 960 901 or Email me.

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Portfolio > Voodoo Ride Australia site

Voodoo Ride is an exciting range of car care products designed and developed by a group of car enthusiasts in the USA.  The Australian distributor is Voodoo Ride Australia, one of the HPF Group of companies who was my previous employer!

This is the second side I developed for Voodoo Ride during my time with HPF, the design brief for this iteration was to create a current edgy design that highlighted the product range and detailed how to get the best from each product.  The most important requirement for the new site was to allow for simple online purchases.

Backend

I evaluated many options for the backend, from fully fledged e-commerce applications, to hosted commerce solutions and cart plugins for CMS packages.  All probably would have done the job however I had a pretty firm idea how I wanted the site to look and feel so in the end I ‘rolled my own’ solution!

There is no CMS backend per se, I used some code I built years ago that uses text files to populate some simple php template files.  Updates require ftp access to the site and editing of files directly, this is no big deal in the application as I would be the only person updating the site.

Cart

The shopping cart functionality uses Paypal for order processing and a great Javascript based application Simple Cart (js) to handle the shopping cart facility.

The end result is a lightweight, easy to use, attractive and effective site and cart solution.

Trickery

As with most custom built sites like this there is a whole lot going on behind the scenes to enhance the user experience that most users would never be aware of.  Here is a few clever bits:

  • Most images on the site are actually css sprites.  This avoids delays in displaying the hover state of buttons and makes the site seem faster for the user. See example image here: http://voodooride.com.au/images/buttons_sprite_8.png
  • Cufon is used for most titles fonts as it was the only solution that rendered properly in all browsers at the time.
  • There is some Javascript code on the stockists page that sorts the stockists alphabetically.  This way there is no need to shuffle items around if a new stockist is added.
  • The contact form is provided by Wufoo.  Sure I could have hand coded a form, however Wufoo provides the ability to link submitted data to Mailchimp, an excellent email marketing provider. If the user accepts, their name and email address is automatically added to the email database, neat huh!
  • There is around 460 characters of code for each one of graduated heading background to make it as cross browser as possible without the use of images.

Head over to voodooride.com.au and have a look.  If you are looking for some car care products I can’t recommend the range of products high enough, the Mojo product in particular is simply amazing!


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