Hello there, PickaPlanters!

It’s great to be able to say that next week, after months of careful planning, nail biting and sleepless nights we’ll be switching on all the features of PickaPlant, the gardening website for today’s new home owners.

The concept behind PickaPlant is unique. We saw our friends settling down and moving into new houses and making their mark on them to create a home, something original and personal to them. But one area remained a problem. What about the garden?

For many people, creating something individual and to be proud of outside the patio doors was a mystery. But worse, the conventional garden centres seemed to cater for the older generation and looked too intimidating for our new home owners.

Maybe getting lost in a sea of beige, staring at rows of grubby plants and getting the new mini’s boot full of compost and worms on the way home probably wouldn’t appeal to PickaPlant’s potential customers!

Take a stroll around a virtual garden

So welcome to PickaPlant. We’ve taken what you want to achieve and created a really cool way of doing it. No special knowledge, no impromptu Latin lessons, no hassle. Just click on what you want, the size and the colour and its yours, straight to your door.

Over the next few weeks, we’ll be expanding the idea to make PickaPlant a place where you’ll be coming back to.

We’ve been burning the midnight oil looking at every inch of the new service, but realise that even the best ideas can have a few hiccups. So we’re hoping that nothing causes you, our customers any problems, but rest assured, we care very much about your relationship with us and will be jumping on any teething troubles quickly.

We wish you all a great experience with PickaPlant and your new garden!

What’s all this about?

Everyone would love a beautiful garden. Relax, entertain friends, play with the kids. But that dream’s out of reach for a lot of people. Particularly non-gardening home owners or people who don’t want to or simply can’t visit a garden centre.

So PickaPlant has used the Internet to bring the garden into everybody’s living room. It’s an exciting and amazingly easy way to choose the plants you need and have them delivered to your garden.

Virtual Gardening – from pick to plot

PickaPlant is a virtual gardening website. It’s designed to make selecting and getting your plants far easier and having much more fun doing it than anything that’s gone before. Here’s how it works.

When visitors arrive on the site they’re taken on a tour around a 3D, moving garden. A butterfly then appears guiding them to the types of plants available, such as trees, bushes, herbs, flowers, etc.

When the visitor spots the type of plant they want, they just click on it. They choose the height and a colour from a colour wheel. That’s it. No more questions. Just pick the plant from the ones presented and the plant is delivered to their garden.

About the PickaPlant site

We wanted PickaPlant to feature the very best in web design to make it incredibly easy to use, by applying the power of the Internet in a way no one has seen before. We took the latest 3D animation software that you’d normally see in state-of-the-art computer games or a design studio to create our virtual garden.

Adding the human touch, removing techno-clutter

PickaPlant technical designer Neil Robinson explains “We wanted to throw away all the “techiness” that so many sites suffer from. We wanted PickaPlant to be human-like. Wherever we could show an option rather than expect the visitor to type stuff in, we’d do it. We use an animated human figure to represent height, a colour wheel to indicate a colour choice.

We also wanted to eliminate the “website fatigue” so many sites suffer from, too. You can get what you want in three clicks. Type of plant, height, colour. Give us your details and the plant is picked, packaged and sent to you.

PickaPlant uses artificial intelligence to replicate high-street shopping. The site uses state-of-the-art “fuzzy logic” to behave like a good gardening expert would when offering choices, an important and key asset of our design.”

PickaPlant’s easy to use, but certainly not boring. There’s a lot available and visitors can go back to the garden as many times as they like. In fact we found that people spend a lot of time exploring.

The design allows ever-expanding choice and options, so returning visitors are always likely to find something new without losing their way because everything’s different from when they came last. (more…)