Virginia Hayward goes live with new site

Gifts cataloguer Virginia Hayward has unveiled a refreshed website to help drive year-round sales. The company, which sells traditional hampers, fair-trade products, Duchy Originals gifts, wines, spirits and flowers to other businesses as well as directly to consumers, produces an annual catalogue that caters primarily for the Christmas trading period.

“The website keeps our profits alive during the rest of the year and provides income on our year-round range of hampers and gifts,” marketing manager Alex Walker explained. The new site, built by Imaginet, links to Virginia Hayward’s back-end distribution system, allowing users to track orders at each stage of the process. It also supports multiple delivery addresses and enables customers to add a personalised message to their hamper order.

As part of the relaunch, Virginia Hayward implemented a number of search engine optimisation tactics to boost traffic. For one thing, it changed the naming conventions of its URLs, basing each one on a product name. In addition, “we realised that we had an enormous amount of content on the website that we weren’t making the most of,” Walker said. “So as an ongoing process, we review each of our pages and make sure that every element works for us”, which includes ensuring that images are alt tagged and image names contain keywords.

“It’s important to get right down into the site code and not miss an opportunity to use your keywords,” Walker said. “Our ultimate aim is to have our position in Google accurately reflect our place in the hamper market. We would really like to see first-page placements on our main key phrases.” To this end Virginia Hayward is working to get the site featured in directory submissions and blogs and to receive quality links from other websites.

Published: 8th September 2008