Bozowi is a mobile phone recycling website that offers very competitive prices for new / used and faulty mobile phones that customers wish to recycle. The website was very dated and suffered from usability, layout and coding issues, the company however suffered mostly from not being able to access, change and / or backup any of the site content or database due to the proprietary nature of the website which was build, hosted and owned by a third party developer.
My task was to plan, organise and execute the construction of a brand new website with a theme and brand refresh. I split my tasks into two main goals, the first was the design and construction of the new site and the second was to refresh the logo and characters of the website.
A screenshot of the old Bozowi website.
The old logo used for bozowi.co.uk
Bozowi Logo / Characters Refresh
New Bozowi Mascots
New Bozowi Logo
Being 2013 I decided the flat sketch style Bo and Zowi looked rather outdated and a 3D design would stand out and look modern, I had to keep in mind that the site had to look friendly so the aliens should be soft colours (keeping the green as used in the original logo's) and the characters would have to look friendly and happy.
I managed to get some some ideas on paper and some specifications together which I then sent across to my 3D graphics artist, and after some revisions this is what he came back with.
The logo itself was looking extremely old and outdated so I decided to put together a new logo in Adobe Illustrator, using multiple layers I put together a slightly 3D effect logo using shades of grey and bordered with solid green as used throughout the website.
Design of the website
When designing the new website, it was decided to use green purple and grey much like the previous website, however the green colour was darkened more to give a softer more welcoming look and feel, I also made sure the theme felt more more modern and also worked perfectly on Mobile and Tablet as over 50% of visitors to Bozowi's website were using such devices!
Some screenshots are presented at the bottom of the page.
Coding of the Website
We decided early on to base the site from a shopping cart, as this would give us most of the platform and features readily provided instead of coding everything from scratch, I decided we should use a free open-source shopping cart software called OpenCart as it was nice and light and had all the major functionality we needed already built into the software. From this base we developed a new theme and have made so many modifications that nobody would even be able to guess that this is an OpenCart system.
The most notable changes were to the registration, login and my account system. We already had user accounts from the old site and a whole internal system so we wired up the OpenCart system to work with all our existing systems, I modified the registration and login system to be more user friendly and to remove any information fields we did not need. The account system was completely replaced with our own accounting system which I built for managing and checking your order status and updating payment details etc.
The checkout system was also heavily modified, we did not need shipping so this was stripped out, and instead of making payment a customer needed to instead provide payment details so we could pay them. Finally after checkout a custom success page was required with packing instructions and our own facebook like button etc.
I also heavily modified OpenCart's Nice URLs system as it did not cover all URLs in the system, now the whole site uses Nice URLs, no php or GET queries are used throughout the system.
