Countryside Ski & Climb
Website Development
UX & Design
E-Commerce
Brief
To re-platform Countryside’s online store and give the site design a refresh. The key objectives were:
- Increase conversion rates and online retail sales.
- Showcase the breadth and depth of products Countryside offer.
- Present a modern, user friendly, accessible design.
- Scalable and extensible CMS framework to build on over the coming years.
- Improve SEO and increase traffic from natural search.
- Build the site using HTML5 to help future proof their investment in the platform.
- Develop the site using a responsive approach so that it worked effectively on mobile and tablet devices.
Solution
After an initial period of e-commerce platform evaluation, we had distilled the potential options for the new Countryside website down to a handful of solutions. Given the specific requirements of the project, most platforms were ruled out because of either; cost, lack of flexibility, lack of responsive mobile support or poor back-office system integration options.
Although we had not previously used Drupal Commerce (which was largely due to the fact that it was so new, and back in 2011), we recommended it as the best solution for the project. This was largely based on our experience with the Drupal platform, and our confidence in its ability to meet challenging requirements.
After weighing up the options, Countryside decided to go with our recommended solution of using Drupal Commerce because of its synergy with the requirements of the project.
More information about the project can be found on our write up of the project.
Technical highlights
- Full integration with the legacy back office system to control stock levels, pricing and order status and data syncing throughout the day. This was achieved using the Drupal Migrate module.
- Brand management including creation of landing pages through Drupal.
- Leveraging Solr for site wide faceted search.
- Valid HTML5 markup and responsive web design optimisations.
- Hosted on AWS to meet flexible traffic demands.
- Definition of a variety of custom Drupal Commerce product types to support varying size, colour, and type variations.
- Full Drupal Commerce integration.
