Blakley Electrics Limited is dedicated to manufacture and distribute the top level High Performance Power and Lighting products. They turned to us in the need of a new Drupal e-commerce website that would perform better for them and most importantly, for their customers.
Their old site was an e-commerce site running Drupal 6 and Ubercart, they had naturally added to, and extended the site over the years, and it was getting to a point where major new features were getting quite complicated to implement while not effecting the current workflow or existing module systems.
We were brought in to offer a complete redesign as well as to create the new site in Drupal 7 and Drupal commerce.
About the project
New design to better reflect them as a company
One of the core items for the new site and project as a whole was the redesign, the old site was only around 5 years old, but a lot has changed in that time. From the speed of peoples web connection, to the devices they are using, the site needed to adapt to the times.
We completed the design stage in 2 months, this was a fairly quick turnaround, and something that was needed due to the amount of development to come.
Fully responsive design
We, or course, made sure the designs were submitted from mobile up to large desktop, with wireframes through to designs for each core section, to make sure everyone understood how things were to progress.
Cross-site integration
Blakley have thousands of products, so they wanted to make sure that linked products, as well as relevant articles could be brought into product pages, so that customers could navigate freely between core sections and get the most out of the site. This is something that was planned fully from the initial wireframes.
Shop and dedicated catalog products
Around a third of the companies products can be purchased through the site, the rest are more for large trade organisations and cannot be purchased online. For this reason they needed some similar page layouts, with technical data diagrams and supporting files, but there needed to be a clear distinction of what was in the shop and what wasn't.
We used a mix of colour and small layout changes to clearly show what section you were currently on, even if you had come directly into a sub page from an external source.
A secure platform that is converting and generating sales
Blakley are very happy with the resulting site, they have been moved onto the next level of systems from where they were before, and have made the site much more user friendly and clear, in terms of purchase options and general navigation.
The project took 4 months in total, from start to finish. We continue to support the site, and the team at London Design Works are looking forward to extending their new Drupal e-commerce site where needed in the months and years to come.
Why Drupal was chosen
Drupal was selected by the company because their previous site was running Drupal 6 and Ubercart, so while they had made clear decisions to upgrade and improve the site, they were still happy with the CMS as a whole. With our options to migrate their e-commerce history / products from Drupal 6 over to Drupal 7 running commerce, it was a clear and straight forward decision for them.
Technical Specifications
Drupal version:
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Commerce
The cornerstone of the site, they had used Ubercart well in the past but commerce just took everything to another level, and it stays our e-commerce platform of choice.
Migrate
We used Migrate and the commerce migrate Ubercart module to migrate their products as they had thousands to run through, so greatly appreciated the time saving.
Feeds
As with Migrate, we used Feeds to import their products, we had to use both systems as each product had 5-10 file attachments, which had previously been setup as node references, so with Feeds and Feeds Tamper we could deconstruct the setup and implement it again as needed.
Draggable Views
Each product has its place, and draggable views is a very easy way to maintain this.
Search API
The site uses Solr search, so we use the Search API as well as search facets for the filtering system.
Backup and Migrate
Because every site should have this.
