Work

The challenge

STM Goods had built a substantial online business using Magento as their ecommerce platform. There were some limitations:

1. A fully managed solution, Magento is expensive. Plans start at over $20,000 per year.
2. Magento is difficult and expensive to customise, and limited in the ways in which it can be customised.

The solution

The Magento installation was migrated to WordPress. To preserve the look and feel, the templates were converted to a custom WordPress theme.

Technical notes

• The WordPress installation is Multisite. This allows for multiple freestanding stores, with their own domains, serving different territories. For consistency and ease of administration, all the sites share a common database, functionality, and templates.
• The WooCommerce plugin provides the core of the ecommerce functionality.
• Hosting is provided by WP Engine, a managed WordPress host. A customised plan with a dedicated server costs less than a third of the Magento counterpart, and provides as good or better performance and availability.

More information

• Blog post: Migrating from Magento to WooCommerce

The challenge

The existing WordPress site was well established, and had several years' worth of well-trafficked blog posts. However:

1. the design of the site was clunky and very dated;
2. the design was not responsive, and so was providing a frustrating experience to the growing numbers of mobile users visiting the site.

The solution

A new custom WordPress theme was built from scratch:

• the new theme is fully responsive, and displays optimally on all commonly used devices: smartphones, tablets, and desktops;
• the theme incorporates elements from an original illustration by Linda Gisbrecht, including a new logo, all deployed to work optimally at all screen sizes;
• the updated site incorporates a number of performance tweaks: typical page load times are now less than 2 seconds.