The project came about after detecting that the Balearic Islands is popular for shooting both national and international projects.

The professionals that travel to the islands to do this work face costly travel expenses, and even when they do take their own equipment, with risk of loss or damage this entails, in most cases they still need something else, which has to be purchased locally.

Having become aware of situation after many years in the photography sector in the Balearic Islands, the founders of this project decided to launch an e-commerce site that hires out all sorts of professional photo and video equipment. On the Alquicam website, photographers, camera operators and production teams who are working in the Balearic Islands can find all sorts of equipment at competitive prices delivered in record time (as most on and offline shops specialising in this sort of material are located on the mainland, with the resulting delay in delivery).

The result is a comprehensive project, creating the Alquicam brand and developing its corporate image, then designing and programming the e-commerce site.

As with other similar projects, in terms of programming, the client would have to be able to manage the site on their own (sale, hire, return, stock, discounts, etc.) and add new products, etc. In short, to manage the online business.

One of the characteristics of this website is its sophisticated system to hire products. It is similar to a hotel booking system: users choose the equipment they need and the day they want to hire it from a calendar showing availability. It is slightly more complicated, however, because the equipment can be hired by the hour. So, the system is sophisticated enough to allow the same product to be hired out several times in the same day.

The system automatically calculates the price, using a dynamic system that personalises the price based on the volume of hire time required.

Despite this technical complexity, for users the booking system is simple and practical. The products are the focus of the website, with good photographs and all the important technical information, plus easy access to all prices in real time. It is important to put yourself in the shoes of the professional, who needs a quick solution, so browsing the site has to be quick and easy.

To give the site a touch of creativity (the business is geared toward the creative image sector, so this is essential), the homepage has a touch of design with a banner featuring a parallax effect. For those who don’t know what this is, you’ve surely seen it on a website before. When you scroll down the page, a background image seems to move at a different speed than the rest of the content. Really though, the picture stands still and it is the content that moves over top of it, revealing parts of the image that weren’t visible before as you scroll down.

In our case, the parallax shows a young girl swimming in crystal-clear waters, giving an artistic counterpoint to a site with very clean lines and not much in the way of decoration.