Hand and Lock has been London’s premier supplier of bespoke embroidery for over a century. Work produced by hand at its Margaret Street offices is sent around the world and appears in major film, TV and theatre productions from The Last King of Scotland to the Brit Awards. They offer tailored services to the fashion and film industries and have a vast archive of military insignia and badges.
strangerpixel approached Hand & Lock in February 2007 with a proposal to redevelop their website. The brief was broadly as follows:
- To incorporate the previously disparate elements of the Hand & Lock web environment within a coherent visual design.
- To build a website around a content management system (CMS) that allowed the company more efficient control over their content.
- To enhance both the speed and accessibility of the website by replacing the old table-based design with hand-coded XHTML and CSS.
Many months’ work have produced a site that is fresher, cleaner and easier to maintain than its predecessor. The site has the following features:
- A CMS that allows easy uploading of news information and the creation of a hierarchical page structure across clearly defined navigational sections.
- A gallery of embroidery products containing hundreds of images, all of which are uploaded and maintained via a simple, user-friendly web interface.
- Integrated Google search.
- An Actinic e-commerce system. Actinic was in use on the previous website; this project gave the shop a new theme in line with the main site design.
- Contact forms for feedback and signing up to the company mailing list.
Additional IT services:
- Transition to Google Apps and Google Mail.
