iWeb: My Candles

In Switzerland, UK design is considered to be the leading light. So, to ensure their website outshines the best of the rest, My Candles searched through a wide selection of UK sites to find one that matched their vision. Impressed by the design and navigation of the Bibendum site designed by iweb, My Candles got in touch to ask for help in designing their new content managed e-commerce web site.

Enlightening design

Based in Zurich, My Candles source handcrafted scented candles, soaps and aromatherapy products from around the world. Supplying over 200 top quality products their main objective was to design a web site which was clear, informative and simple to use making browsing and buying as straight forward and pleasurable as possible.

With a strong emphasis on simple and clear design, iweb designed the site to accentuate the professional product photography supplied by the client. Each product page features large images which can be clicked to view extra large high resolution pictures, so the user has a complete and unmistakable view of what is on offer. The visitor can also choose to view the candles lit and unlit to watch the different effects.

With such a wide range of products, My Candles wanted to make sure their visitors can find exactly what they are looking for quickly and easily. To facilitate navigation, iweb developed the innovative product selector, so all shapes and colour combinations for each product range can easily be accessed from the same page. By optimizing the navigation in this way, all products are just three clicks away from the home page.

My Candles is an international site and the company places great importance in communicating with their visitors in their mother tongue. To ensure all of the languages on the multilingual site are accurate, Iweb employed translators from each country.

Custom e-commerce

My Candles had very specific requirements for their shopping cart which could not be fulfilled by any off the shelf systems, so iweb custom designed the ecommerce solution to meet their needs exactly.

The ecommerce solution uses World Pay for transactions, which is integrated with My Candles content managed stock control to enable accurate stock levels on the system. The cart incorporates a minimum order threshold, free postage threshold and shipping calculated by country. As soon as an order is placed it is interfaced with the custom order management system and the data is downloaded in filemaker.

Social networking

To capitalise on the growing trend for social networking, iweb have integrated icons on all product pages which lets visitors easily add the My Candles site to social networking sites del.ic.ious, facebook and stumbleupon and thereby recommend others to visit the My Candles site.