Achernar Solutions
Goanna Bakery [goannabakery.com.au] is an organic bakery and cafe in Lismore, NSW which caters to vegetarians, vegans, and those with dietary requirements such as gluten intolerance.
Geoff Haycraft, owner and proprietor of Goanna Bakery, contacted Achernar Solutions in July 2008 to enquire about improving his web presence – although the bakery already had a website, it was outdated, difficult to maintain and no longer reflected the image that Geoff wanted to present to prospective customers.
Over the course of the following months, I worked with Geoff in order to capture how he wanted his website to present his business, and to explore ways that we could present information that visitors wanted to know in an easy to understand fashion. Along the way, the Goanna Bakery website presented some rather unusual challenges in order to make the site easy to understand, and easy for Geoff to manage.
Firstly, the bakery’s quality breads and pastries are available from other 60 different retailers across Australia, and presenting this information in an accessible format was a key focus of the project. To help display the retailers, Achernar Solutions took Geoff’s data and used this to prepare a map of the stores using Google Maps and Javascript. Using this, visitors can easy see exactly where they can purchase the bakery’s bread – rather than look through a long list of addresses and towns they weren’t familiar with, customers are now able to zoom to map to find areas near them, and drill down to find the most convenient stockist.
Another problem faced was the difficulty in keeping the product listing and order forms consistent – with over 30 products it was difficult to keep all the site consistent whenever the bakery added a new product, or when one was removed. To fill this need, Achernar Solutions wrote a custom extension for the RadiantCMS system (in which the site is developed) allowing Geoff to easily manage the list of products, including the description and prices. This information is then used across the site to ensure that the product list and order forms are always 100% up to date. Even better, this extension has now been released to the open-source RadiantCMS community by Achernar Solutions.
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