Hythe Marina Watersports (HMWS) is a clothing and accessories shop in Hythe. HMWS had an existing brand but no website. Their long term objectives are to sell their store products online and collect a database of customer details for electronic marketing. Short term they want to build their brand awareness in the local Hythe area using their website to create an online community.

Hythe Marina Watersports were looking for a site to appeal to four different distinct lifestyle groups; sailors, skateboarders, surfers and skiers. The design of the website was a real challenge a number of reasons. Our design needed to compliment the existing brand and to appeal to these four distinct yet at times similar lifestyle groups. We needed to build a site that would create an ongoing flow of traffic and grow an online community of users.

The first step in this process was creating an effective site architecture with online facilities that would entice users to visit the site on a regular basis. Our solution was to create four distinct areas of the site. Each has a community tool for each lifestyle group like a trade board for sailors. Each area contains a product reviewer who reviews a in store product fortnightly, these reviewers were chosen from the local community and on merit.

Finally we had to display all this information in a tidy and easy to navigate website. The use of colours in the site (mainly blue and orange) keeps the style of their identity, but also serves to frame the great photography. Having access to great lifestyle photos was a huge help in creating an attractive and exciting design which is sure to be a success!

A back-end using Microsoft Access and ASP3 allows products to be uploaded to the site and allows complete control over all the community tools on the website. The product reviewers can logon remotely and add their reviews when and where they want to. Users can add messages to the bulletin boards posted across the website.

Technical Challenges for the Hythe Marina Watersports Site included:

Special deals - random selection from a pool of items (determined by administrator) to be shown on every page.

Catalogue administration - Allows administrator to create new items and to determine it's brand (and display a logo on the site if appropriate), to set a deal price (and show relative discount as a percentage) and to choose if it's to appear as a deal highlight.

Reviews - Users can be created by the administrator who can log into the site and review products from one or more of the rages of products, detremined by the administator.