ABOUT

Poundland, a leading discount retailer in the UK, recently launched the Dealz brand over in France and Spain. In 2016, Poundland had a website built specifically for their Spanish audience but it was being bombarded by hacker attacks. The team at AMA were asked to rebuild the website to ensure maximum security and prevent future attacks. The reason for the rebuild meant that time was of the essence, with a new site needing to be produced quickly but without compromising on quality.

We started over from scratch, completely rebuilding the website from the ground up, including:
- New front-end CSS-HTML
- A new content management system that was better suited to resisting hacking attempts
- Research, recommendation and implementation of a new hosting solution, with monthly maintenance and reporting for more robust and reliable security
- Improved user experience (UX) for visitors
- Usability improvements for internal staff, allowing for improved editing of product content and images

We completed the entire project in less than a month, implementing top level security and giving the client peace of mind. The client was delighted with the full responsive website design and the improvements that exceeded initial expectations.

This year, Dealz France was launched, and AMA were tasked with creating a mobile optimised website that matched the Dealz brand and created a comfortable user experience. Using the Dealz brand colours, our talented developers created a similar site to that of the Dealz Spain website to keep the brand consistent worldwide. We handled all content translations into French.

Our designers created various assets for the website, such as the images for the homepage carousel, and the countdown clock, which is currently being used to highlight to users that new stores are being launched across France. When the countdown clock reaches zero, a bespoke message is displayed. We also implemented a store locator, which shows the exact location of the Dealz stores across France, as well as opening times.

One aspect that Poundland wanted to focus on was the clothing section of the website, which is named “Prêt-à-Porter”. For this section of the website, we created carousels to display the products in different sections such as “Bébé” (baby) and “Maillots de ban” (swimwear). The carousels feature images of products that we fully optimised for web use, as any image that was too large would have slowed down the loading speed of the website. In addition to this, we created new yellow and blue roundels to show the prices effectively, which are different colours to those seen on the other product carousels. The price for every roundel is separate to the image, and editable in the CMS.

As with every website we make, we followed our robust design and build process which ensures that the end result gives the user the best viewing experience no matter what device type they use. The client was happy with our work following the launch of five French stores to date, and we continue to work closely with Dealz and Poundland.