Organized website to give Smith Farm Stores a marketing advantage for their primary sales effort: workwear, outerwear, and footwear. On-line shoppers have a preference for sites that specialize in the product that they are purchasing. The specialization usually means more information, better support, and reliable inventory. We segmented the products for the Workwear specialty store in "categories" and the other product lines in "departments."

  Customer service information is featured prominently in the upper right corner. A phone number and online chat are clearly visible without extra clicks or searching.

  Featured items give people a quick idea of products available and becon them to keep browsing.

  Personalized greeting is shown to the right of the logo when a user is logged in.

The site uses the AspDotNetStoreFront shopping cart with real-time shipping quotes.

  Organized a complex product and service offering in a compact format. Product areas such as the Ace hardware store, Lumber Yard, Power Center, Garage Doors, Party Central and Garden Center run across the top navy bar; service areas run across the bottom navy bar. Then we provide four squares in the middle to provide another orientation for browsing and finding information.

  Used a lot of photography. Stoughton woman-of-many-trades, Lisa McChristian, added photographer to her role as a technical specialist. She took all the pictures of the store and staff. Additionally, we used on-line stock photography for the top center image. It rotates with each new visit.

  Advertised different aspects of Stoughton Lumber’s products and services via a text box in the top center area. It rotates each time the user goes to a different sub-page.

  Saved labor costs by automating the production of the rental pages. Stoughton Lumber offers many products for rental: contractor, homeowner, party, and new rentals. We made the decision to produce these pages via PatternStream automation. In this case, Stoughton Lumber does not own the ability to run the automation. The automation, however, enabled Active Lightning to be more efficient and save labor costs.

The site uses iNet. iNet is a web application from Activant that integrates with the Eagle System (inventory, point-of-sale, and accounting system). iNet offers account information, quotes, and on-line purchases for contractors via OrderPro. People who do not have an account with the store can use iNet via eStore which does not require a login.

We took advantage of the ability to jump into iNet via hyperlinks that jump directly to a target product, class, or department.

The site provides the character of Stoughton Lumber to visitors. At the same time it provides Stoughton Lumber with the means for enhancing revenue.

 Utilized product pictures extensively. This enables Spanish-speaking users to browse (without Spanish descriptions), and it makes the browsing process go more quickly since a picture is worth a thousand words. (Cox Hardware is more focused towards commercial customers over consumers, so dial-up users are not a limiting factor.) This also takes advantage of a key competitive advantage: Cox Hardware’s extensive image directory.

 Mimiced the store shopping experience via a map of the store layout that has rollover effects. As a user rolls over a given department, s/he sees a 4 thumbnail images appear to indicate a sample of products in that department. For people who shop in the physical store, they learn more about where items are located for their recurring visits; also, their previous visits inform them about where to start their browsing experience. In other words, the online experience reinforces the bricks and mortar experience. Even for people who do not shop in person at the physical store; this approach provides an intuitive interface. The next level of browsing is like looking at various shelves where each one displays the products associated with a class (a level of organization in the Eagle System).

Did more for Spanish-speaking people that are a significant percentage of Cox Hardware's customers. Three key pages in addition to the Virtual Hardware Store are provided in Spanish. When a user clicks on a department in the Virtual Hardware Store (or Ferreteria Virtual), s/he is shown a page of the classes in that department, again with sample thumbnails of products in that class. A link in English, “complete listing,” next to the class name provides the means to get a product listing for the whole class. A link in Spanish, “...mas,” to the right of the image thumbnails also provides the means to get a product listing for the whole class. (These html pages are produced with PatternStream automation.)

Virgil Cox, the owner, made a decision early on to utilize iNet, a web application from Activant. It integrates with the Eagle System that Cox uses for inventory, point-of-sale, and accounting. He wanted the iNet frame at the top of the page to be consistently present so that users do not realize when they transfer from the coxhardware.com site to the op1.triadnet.com server utilized for iNet. We took advantage of the ability to jump into iNet via hyperlinks that jump directly to a target product, class, or department.

Virgil Cox also participated in designing the home page. He determined the sub-page organization and content. He produced reference guides for his staff: fasteners and other metal hardware, to post on the Useful Information page. He also did a lot of work to develop the help page, policies page, and legal terms of use. See his comments on this project below.

The Active Lightning designer, Baker, contributed the palette and a number of design elements.