Horses24.ee

The creation of Horses24

Horses24 is a buy-and-sell portal for horses, equestrian equipment, and other related products and services, created by hobbyists. Based on their own experience and needs, they noticed that a suitable online environment for selling and purchasing horses and equestrian equipment was missing in Estonia and its neighbouring countries. They decided to fill the gap and an exciting project was born where we helped the client to design an idea into a complete solution.

Customised solution for a sales portal

Since the portal is directed to 12 countries where every country has its own domain name, a customised solution was needed since there was no suitable freeware available or their modifications would have cost more than building a solution from scratch.

We had to asses how to create a functioning environment that would be welcomed by its users, how to do marketing for the portal with low costs by using social media and SEO, and how the user would navigate the website. We also had to consider how to make inserting the sales or purchase announcements as easy and simple as possible for clients while trying to asses how the users would act on the site.

Since the equine industry was unfamiliar to us, we surfed for hours through different sales environments for horse supplies and hobby forums to learn the terminology and understand equestrian sports.

By studying the competitive web-portals, we found that modern and innovative solutions were rarely used, so we planned to create a competitive edge by designing the convenient user experience for both desktop and mobile devices.

Technically, this type of project was new in our portfolio. Sure, we had created buy-and-sell environments before, but not for an environment targeted for so many different markets where complexity grew by adding every new content type. Fortunately, we had invested a lot of time in the starting phase for creating a well-structured application architecture, which really paid off in the end.

What should great user experience look and feel like?

Since the equine industry was unfamiliar to us, we surfed for hours through different sales environments for horse supplies and on hobby forums to learn the terminology and understand equestrian sports.

By studying the competitive web-portals, we found that modern and innovative solutions were rarely used, so we planned to create a competitive edge by designing the convenient user experience for both desktop and mobile devices.

Technically, this type of project was new in our portfolio. Sure, we had created buy-and-sell environments before, but not for an environment targeted for so many different markets where complexity grew by adding every new content type. Fortunately, we had invested a lot of time in the starting phase for creating a well-structured application architecture, which really paid off in the end.