Ashworth & Thompson
Design
Build
eCommerce
WordPress
Import
This project is one of our most involved pieces of work, with a migration from Magento v1 to WordPress & WooCommerce.
Design
A mobile friendly new design was created to replace the desktop size only old site. Ashworth & Thompson have an in house photographer so we had some great images to work with. Our design brief was used as a starting point, with wireframes and then full designs going back and forth a few times until everyone was happy with the new design. We made the search and login/cart links as prominent as possible as the customer base are an older, less computer savvy demographic.
WooCommerce build
Once the designs were complete, we built this into a fast loading, lightweight WooCommerce theme. We don’t use generic themes as they can be slow, limiting and long term support can be uncertain. By knowing exactly what’s included and having full control of the layout we can closely match the site to a design.
The site includes a ‘flexible template’ that allows the text pages to be built up from easy to use panels within WordPress. Adding or changing pages is clear and simple for the client, without all the clutter of the ‘Gutenberg’ visual editor.
A ‘chop tool’ was required for custom frame sizes. This was coded from scratch so it met their needs, using the product data to show a live updated price for that frame size. This was a real challenge and we learned lots of new things about WooCommerce while coding this part of the site.
Product import
The original site had a large number of products entered, with many attributes such as colour, pack size and finish. It looked like the site had evolved over time too, so there was lots of redundant data saved to the products. Complex spreadsheet transforms were required to clean the product data and prepare it for import to WooCommerce. This process saved potentially hundreds of hours of manually entering products to the new site!
Green Hosting
As the site was so complex and needed more resources than our packages can offer, we arranged green hosting direct with our hosting provider.
Maintenance & Updates
To keep things up to date we carry out monthly software updates and check the ecommerce functionality and contact forms. The built in WordPress updater makes this easier than other platforms, ensuring the site is safe from hackers and always gets the latest features.
One of the sticking points with the old site was price updating. With WooCommerce, the products can be exported as a CSV file, the prices updated and then the file uploaded to update everything at once.
Summary
This complex migration was one of our largest projects to date. The successful move to WooCommerce allows Ashworth & Thompson to keep their site up to date more easily than Magento. If you’re still running an older, unsupported ecommerce platform we can probably migrate your site to WooCommerce. Contact us for a chat and no obligation quote.