Gardiner Haskins

This project was pretty significant in its size. The exisiting e-commerce website had been around for several years and been through quite a few interations. It wasn't however performing well nor was it optimised that well, it had been built in Wordpress and included woo commerce and a whole load of plugins.

Project Brief for Gardinder Haskins

The brief for the new website was to create a solid and scalable e-commerce platform, integarted with 3rd party API's for shipping, delivery and included HubSpot integration. The Hubspot integartion was for the new "Department" pages and sections which are for lead generation and capture.

As part of the proejct we also had to migrate and optimse the content from the old site and build in a complex set of 301 re-directs from old urls to new. 

The Process of designing and developing an e-commerce website

After agreeing the formal technical specification we started with the wireframing process and then on to the full design run. We used an online portal called Invision for sharing designs with customers that gives them the ability to comment and markup design prototypes and also gives the ability to have a full historical interation log.

With the mobile first design approach we can also send working versions of our websites or apps for use on our clients mobile devices. This is a great way for basic user testing and feedback, i.e. we can develop the checkout process without actually having to fully develop the site, a great way of saving time and resources and stopping the dreaded "oh could we just change this a bit as we didn't think about that during the design phase". 

Once the designs are all signed off and agreed we can start the "chop", taking all the designs and building the full HTML templates. This process differs from project to project depending on what is required, i.e. we may be using pre rendered components when building in React or Angular for example, or may be using Google's Material components in the build of Apps or PWA's. During this phase the development will already be well under way. With this project we were building a fully bespoke Content Management System so were able to start the basic framework build at day one. This reduces the overall time required and also enables us to get content pre loaded into a DB.

So, after the build and development we went through a testing phase with the client and prepared the site for launch. There's a whole range of tools that we use for testing and I won't go through them all here as we'd never finish this case study... But the site launched and it looks and performs fantastically, so another very happy customer;-)