CASE STUDY

New website for a school supply company

Introduction

The client was a large ecommerce store selling personalised products to schools, academies, and colleges across the UK & Internationally.

Their previous website was built on an old custom CMS and was a good 10 years old when they came to us looking to modernise. The key motivation for wanting to rebuild the site was to offer a better experience to customers wanting to buy personalised items such as stickers, badges and certificates.

They also wanted to move the site away from the old custom CMS, and migrate over to WordPress to take full advantage of the WP ecosystem and everything it offers. The previous CMS was no longer supported by the agency that built it and wasn’t receiving any further updates & features.

Project Scope

The scope of this project was to get the product personalisations just right to give the very best UX to customers buying custom products from the site directly. The core range of personalisable products included stickers, badges, certificates, postcards and more. For some of the products they also required things like print-ready files to send straight to their printer suppliers.

As well as introducing a whole new personalisable front-end for customers, there was a challenge all in itself of migrating the data from the old CMS and then compiling it into a format that was fit for importing into WordPress / WooCommerce. There were many weeks of dedicated hours working in CSV files, performing lookups to map the data correctly from different db tables and more.

It needed to be fast and easy for the client to manage as well. This client receives hundreds of orders every single day, with a dedicated sales & support team who need to be able to use the backend of the site to process orders and update products/prices regularly.

Development and Technology

Of course we used WordPress for this project paired with WooCommerce for the full ecommerce platform, essential for this build.

After weeks of research trying to find the right tool for the job with the personalisable products, we ended up with the perfect solution that not only did everything we needed in terms of personalisation, but also print-ready files which were essential for the client and a ton of customisable settings to tailor the experience to our needs for this project.

We used ACF blocks for the pages, with WooCommerce templating for the store.

We used a variety of ecommerce plugins and features including quantity discount tables, one-click reordering, abandoned cart reminders, address verification lookup and more.

We also used a range of plugins that were beneficial for caching, increased security and optimising the large media library. Of course, we always try to keep plugins at a minimum to ensure optimal site speed.

Results and Outcomes

The launch of the new website was a great success and the client reported the move over to WordPress, especially for the team internally, as a big win for them. It was easy for them to manage and maintain themselves and knowing they were now on a modern platform with a full support & maintenance contract in place gave them full confidence and peace of mind.

Shortly after launching the site we set up a new plugin to handle abandoned carts which sent reminder emails to customers, which also saw an upturn in sales from the site – something that wasn’t possible previously for them.

The site, although at a premium price point, given the size and scope of the project, has effectively paid for itself in sales since launching at the beginning of the year.

We continue to work very closely with this client, maintaining their website and adding new functionality as requested. They also have a support plan so that we are on hand whenever they need assistance.

New website for a school supply company

Introduction

Project Scope

Development and Technology

Results and Outcomes

Our web dev process

Receive design

Configure server

Install WordPress

Setup theme.json

Register post types

Create templates

Build pages

Optimise SEO

Run tests

Sign-off

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