Our goal was to create a sense of class, luxury and style that fit with the company's corporate ID, which thinksync also developed.

Using the logo device as a starting point, Tish and ourselves independently came to the idea of using an old-world price tag as the background for the logo and to set the visual aesthetic for the site.

From there we incorporated paper textures wherever possible to continue the theme of luxury and charm.

We also taught Tish how to build a light tent and use off-the-shelf lighting products from Bunnings to take extremely professional looking product shots. Often an area which brings down the overall appearance of a site, Tish's product shots look fantastic and very much add to the site's appeal.

Based on the Joomla CMS and VirtueMart shopping cart, the site is massively customised. While Joomla's flexible templating engine allows us to create striking visual layouts with ease, VirtueMart is not quite so customisable. Although the shopping cart is feature-packed enough for most sites, the ability to theme its category, product and cart layouts is extremely limited out of the box. We had to resort to some brute-force hacking of the system to allow the visual presentation we were after. This will make future upgrades harder, but these issues should be resolved in the next release.

Additionally we used the third-party plugins AWOCoupons to manage extremely flexible coupon codes and Inventory Control to manage extended product attributes.

Ambient Living is growing in leaps and bounds, with several hundred products now listed in the store.