Bellmans auctioneers

The Brief

Bellmans is a well established fine art auctioneers who has grown in both size and reputation since its initial founding in 1989. They are now one of the largest auction houses in the South of England and have put extensive effort into becoming one of the leading online auctioneers throughout the whole of the UK.

COVID brought about a lot of issues for many UK businesses and Bellmans Auctioneers House was no different. As they could no longer hold in-person auctions for the best part of two years, the forward-thinking team at Bellmans began to focus more on holding online auctions.

To ensure their online auctions were as seamless, smooth and successful as possible, the key requirements of the project were to:

Improve the look and style of the site
Ensure colours used across the site are consistent with the Bellmans brand
Properly represent Bellmans as a high-end, well established auction house
Create a website that is capable of running live auctions
Have a system in place for online bidding
Build a website that can reliably handle high volumes of traffic without crashing or slowing.

What We Did

As Bellmans already had an existing specialist third-party provider in mind (Snoofa) to run their online auctions, our work was dually focused on creating an attractive, well-functioning website that will be used for marketing, publicity and distributing information as well as integrating Snoofa into the site.

Of course, there were a lot of technical points to cover here, as we set up the new website so that it could quickly grab information from the auctioneering platform and correctly display it for visitors and participants in their online auctions.

The website was built by us closely working alongside Snoofa to ensure all pages flowed together seamlessly. Although you would not notice it when looking at the site due to the fantastic work both ourselves and Snoofa carried out, the site is actually co-hosted, with some pages being controlled by Snoofa and others hosted and controlled by Inspire. This was the biggest challenge and also the main requirement of the project: creating a site that worked seamlessly on the front end whilst going between different hosting platforms on the backend.

Key work we carried out was:

Ensuring design was consistent across our own pages and Snoofa’s pages
Ensuring the menu was consistent and present on all pages
Creating a seamless transition between pages hosted by Inspire and pages hosted by Snoofa
Show Bellmans as high-value auctioneers who are experts in their fields

The Outcome

We were successful in meeting Bellmans requirements for a well-functioned, well-designed website that shows Bellmans as a high-end auctioneer. We incorporated their brand colours and make these consistent across the site and worked closely with Snoofa to ensure web navigation between pages was seamless and smooth.

Bellmans were extremely happy with the work carried out and are pleased with how their site looks and more importantly, how it functions for online auctions. This is summed up by the kind review left by Bellmans,

“We are delighted with the finished product. Martin and his team have worked with us in a very collaborative way and also with our other third-party providers. Our experience has only been positive.”

After the site went live Bellmans signed up to an ongoing SEO package with Inspire, illustrating the positive working relationship we harnessed through the website build. Our SEO work is progressing well as we continue to improve their search visibility and get more traffic to their site in order to boost traction for their auctions and sales.

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