Walford Timber
One shop, two kinds of customer.
Walford Timber have been timber merchants since 1945. They sell fencing, gates, sawn timber and landscaping materials to builders buying on account and to homeowners paying at a checkout, out of three yards that never hold quite the same stock.
Which yard you buy from changes the answer
Timber is heavy, bulky and priced by what is actually in the yard. A fence panel at Ross-on-Wye is not the same proposition as the same panel two hundred miles away, so the site asks which branch you are buying from and works from there.
Trade and retail then sit on top of that one catalogue. Account holders get their discounts, payment options and local delivery once they are logged in, and everyone else gets an ordinary checkout. Keeping both on the same products is the only way a merchant’s team can keep it current.
Built for a catalogue that moves
Fencing is seasonal, stock shifts between the yards, and the people running the site are timber merchants rather than web people.
Stock depends on the yard
A branch selector sets stock levels and delivery from whichever of the three yards you are buying from, rather than quoting a national average that is wrong everywhere.
Trade and retail in one shop
Trade accounts sit alongside the ordinary checkout, with their own discounts, payment options and local delivery, running off the same catalogue.
Notices the team post themselves
A site-wide notice is editable in the CMS, so a stocktake closure or a delivery delay goes up in minutes without anyone ringing a developer.
Written for people, not merchants
Category pages explain the products in plain terms, so someone who does not know a closeboard panel from a lap panel can still buy the right one.
What I did
Another webdna build, and the same split. The design and the strategy were not mine. I was handed the static design, and the content model and the front end were mine from there.
A timber merchant’s customers are often standing in a yard on a phone with one bar, so it is mobile-first and held to a performance budget rather than tuned on a fast desk machine. Nine top-level categories, deep product grids and a trade state that changes prices on the page all have to hold up at every width, with a keyboard, and for somebody using a screen reader. None of that is in a design file. It gets decided while the markup is being written, which is why the markup is written semantically in the first place.
Most of it is invisible when it has been done properly. That is precisely why it tends to get skipped.
