If you want to win big for Christmas check out our parent company iomart’s Xmas Advent Calendar.
Every day between now and 19th December we are offering a fantastic prize from our customers and brands if you can answer a simple question about a festive film.
So if you know your White Christmas from your It’s a Wonderful Life follow @iomart on Twitter and the hashtag #iomartxmas and you could win anything from tickets to Wembley to a hamper full of tech.
Today’s prize is a beautiful handbag set from Easyspace customer VVA.
VVA stands for Versatile, Vivacious and Adorable and is the label for a range of beautiful handbags designed with the contemporary woman in mind. From her studio in the west of Scotland VVA’s founder Sarah crafts a range of stylish and timeless everyday handbags using traditional methods.
Having designed clothes and accessories in her spare time for many years, Sarah turned her talents to handbags. After completing a university course and an apprenticeship with a design studio where she spent time with a former Mulberry creative director, she began to hand craft her own designs using the finest British and Italian leather and materials.
Sarah says, “The handbags I design and create range from our Signature 2 to 1 tote handbags to shoulder bags right through to ultra-modern gadget gloves that can hold your essential smart technology. Ultimately they’re affordable luxury items that I’ve styled for our busy modern lives.”
As a small start-up business in the fashion industry it was important to create a good looking website that would showcase the products and allow customers to browse and buy online 24/7 from wherever they happened to be located . Sarah chose Easyspace, iomart’s ICANN-accredited domain name registrar and web hosting company to help her achieve this.
First of all she needed to secure a domain name. She chose the short and memorable VVA.co.uk which Easyspace then acquired for her from a private domain seller with minimal fuss. Easyspace then set up an email and basic web hosting account so she could start to create her website and get her business up and running online.
The Easyspace design team created an example template based on her ideas for the look of the website which was approved quickly and the team then used the powerful EasySiteLivePRO (ecommerce edition) to construct its framework. The website was delivered as a blank canvas, allowing Sarah and her team to create new pages and load the content and imagery quickly and easily.
“As the seasons change so do the types of handbags I make so I need to update the website with new photographs and text regularly,” Sarah explains. “Using the EasysiteLive Pro software makes it simple for me to publish and remove content myself. It’s definitely better than having to pay a designer to update the website for me.”
With EasysiteLive Pro you can choose from a range of custom templates and colour schemes, create image galleries and contact forms, add search engine data easily and link to Paypal. This eCommerce aspect is important for VVA because customers need to be able to buy directly through the website 24 hours a day.
Like all successful small businesses VVA has had to incorporate the need to control its stock and also to reflect the desire from customers to buy directly from their smartphones. As a result the website includes inventory control with eBay and Amazon and is fully optimised for mobile.
