An Island Web Design website and e-commerce solution for Mia

About the company

Mia was set up in 2009 by Maria Guy, after leaving her position as Head of Buying for House of Fraser. She opened her first shop in Ryde and subsequently opened in Newport in 2014 and Cowes in 2017. A men's store was also added in Ryde but the focus is very much on the ladies' boutiques.

The company managed without any form of web presence until 2020 when the pandemic and the ensuing lock-downs forced them, like so many other companies, to diversify and find alternative avenues for their sales.

Unique to Mia was the fact that they had a very loyal customer base on the mainland; customers who would visit the Island 2 or 3 times a year and make a visit to Mia one of the primary reasons for coming to the Isle of Wight.

In addition to the local regulars, it was these customers, and their 2000 strong following on Facebook, that they wanted to target.

It is always nice when you can design a brand new 'first' website for a company with recognised branding in place. The main colour scheme was there and as well as a logo. Other than that, all we needed to do was find a couple of additional fonts, for headers and body text, and we were off.

Using a website called 'What The Font' we quickly discovered that the logo was made with the Typewriter Serial' font family so we downloaded that to create a crisp digital version of the logo, where before we only had a grainy phone image from a shopfront sign.

The client produced some content for the main pages and after that it was mostly a race to get the site built as quickly as possible and to set up the e-commerce feature, format the invoicing/shipping/address label flow and set up the payment processor.

While this was going on, the client did a tremendous amount of work. Using shop managers and staff as models, so as to depict the clothes being worn by real women, a photoshoot was arranged and hundreds of images were produced. This was swiftly followed by a crash course in managing the online store and uploading products. There is a lot to learn when setting up your first online store but Island Web Design were on hand in person, over the phone and by remote access, to make sure the process went as smoothly as possible, even for someone who was not all that familiar around computers.

Getting the site up and running in a hurry was the first objective. Now that this is done, we are concentrating on optimising the site for search engines (SEO) and making it more user friendly. To achieve this, we started making use of our unique product image gallery feature (follow the link to open the article for more information) and we have started on a monthly rolling digital marketing support program whereby we will be creating and optimising the web site, the Google My Business profiles and email marketing programme.

Other services provided: Domain name registration, Email Hosting, Digital Marketing Support