note: screenshots below are by no means the completed project – there’s still much to do!

After much to-ing and fro-ing, we settled on using BigCommerce as the platform for the new site. It was the best balance between front end flexibility and backend power that led us there.  The site is slowly evolving with Ben from Torico inputting products whilst I build the frontend into something that works, and looks the part.

As with using any off the shelf tool, there’s always a pay off between the features you want, the features you need, the features you can live without and price + ease of use. I’ll write a post about how we came to choose BigCommerce over Shopify and the rest. It wasn’t an easy decision!

More Mountain needed a more efficient way to handle their bookings, and more importantly to gather information from their guests.

Previously, they had a word document booking form that the group leader downloaded, printed off, filled out, signed and sent back via snail mail. This system worked, but was not without it’s downsides: The group leader was responsible for entering all the groups information (up to 14 people) – They had to find out their dietry requirements, flight details, sleeping preferences etc etc. It left a lot of work to be done by the group leader alone. This lead to delays getting the booking forms back and errors when they were returned. Once a booking was confirmed and the form sent back, MoreMountain had to chase up their clients for balance payments when they were due and had to sift through printed forms to find out who was staying where in their chalets.

The new system allows MoreMountain to email the group leader (and a nominated “second in command”) with the new online booking form. The form can be filled out in stages, forwarded on to the other group members to fill out their details and then submitted to MoreMountain.

The form displays all the details of the groups bookings for both MoreMountain and the group leader. Any further changes can be delt with via the back end and the client can see how much is owed and when. The system emails clients 2 weeks prior to their balance payment being due – a gentle reminder to the group leader to gather payments.

On top of this, the system can generate VAT invoices for MoreMountains accounts (saving them doing it manually) and can show them real time cashflow forecasts based on the current bookings in the system.

In the future clients will be able to pay online, saving another step and streamlining the process from start to finish.

Technologies used:

• Django/Python/MySQL
• HTML/CSS/Javascript

And the latest version with graphics n everyfin’

 
Playing with Boids from Guy Bowden on Vimeo.

Need to find my old work with video cameras….

I’ve decided to take this opportunity to learn something new, so I’m building it in Python and Django. Both are new to me. So far it’s going well!

homepage design

alternate homepage

current state