SEO | Web Development | Social Media
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Web Development
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Web Development
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In this web design case study, I will discuss our work for an American online art gallery shop. You will learn how we designed and developed this webshop with over 500 products while keeping it fast and functional.
Winter Museo is an online art gallery shop that sells posters and fine art prints from established illustrators and photographers. This unique fusion makes Winter Museo stand out from competitive shops and online galleries, while dozens of 5-star google reviews are a testament to the high quality of their services.
It comes as no surprise that any company selling products or services online with an e-commerce platform must place high importance on its website design and user experience.
This is even more pronounced for companies that have no physical space, such as Winter Museo. It wouldn’t be far from the truth to say that such a company’s whole success or failure depends on its website presentation and functionality.
Taking all this into consideration, it becomes clear that the primary goal of this project was to create a fully functional, stylized, user-friendly webshop.
To complete this, Winter Museo needed to display hundreds of products, some with color variations, in multiple categories and hire expert developers to provide custom solutions for desirable effects.
After a successful collaboration on a social media management project, the CEO of Winter Museo, Shea Roggio, contacted us and inquired about our web development services.
He was looking for a new company with a fresh set of eyes to take over the work on wintermuseo.com from its current developers. Having been satisfied with our previous work, commitment, and transparency, he felt it was a natural choice to continue to evolve his collaborations with Paradox Bay and allow us to take over his website requirements.
Prior to accepting his invitation to take over the SEO and web development for his site, we completed an A-Z audit and arranged an exploration meeting to share our results and give an in-depth view of how we could improve his page.
From the initial audit, it was clear the site was in poor shape. It was slow, had broken links, had a nonresponsive and unimaginative design, and had no SEO basics like proper H tags, meta and alt tags, or keyword-oriented content. In addition, almost all plugins were outdated since the previous company was not conducting regular maintenance.
We noticed that some critical features like the SSL certificate were missing, and the shipping plugins and payment gateways were still not completed. After sharing our findings, Shea defined his expectations during the meeting and left the execution of such tasks entirely up to us.
The first stage of our plan was to tackle the essential issues such as product optimization, cart, checkout, and shipping fixes, along with the critical SEO elements missing on the site. We also connected all of the company’s social media accounts owned by Winter Museo and worked greatly to improve the overall site speed.
One of the most significant issues with the website was its size and speed. We quickly realized that all images used on the home, shop, contact, and blog pages were poorly optimized, taking up many resources and deteriorating the user experience.
We resized all photos, applied proper compression, and used descriptive filenames. As you can see, we immediately focused on two aspects – website speed improvement by serving images in appropriate sizes and image SEO optimization by giving descriptive names to all image files.
As a result, we managed to decrease page size by 80%, which resulted in a positive increase in performance score (from 67% to 90%).
This is significant since people often underestimate the importance of page speed. It impacts not just the user experience, which I might add is essential, especially for an e-commerce brand, but it also impacts search engine rankings. These factors dictate the amount of traffic to your website, which directly affects your sales and success.
On the topic of search engines, we did a complete SEO audit and fixed multiple issues creating a proper foundation for future SEO work. We fixed the previously mentioned H, alt, and meta tags and did comprehensive keyword research for every page of the site, just to name a few.
As the last step of our first stage of development, we implemented regular updates and backups to ensure the site worked continuously with no issues or vulnerabilities.
It’s important that the site is backed up on the hosting service cloud. Additionally, we keep the latest additions on our internal drives in case of emergencies.
Once the first stage was completed, we pivoted to growing the site and populating it with more products. Over the course of a few months, hundreds of new products and dozens of new categories were added to the site.
Additional pages were also designed and developed, including the home page, which received an extensive redesign.
It’s natural that as you’re constantly designing and developing a website that new technical issues will present themselves that need fixing and the company itself will request new features be implemented. This was no exception for Winter Museo, and we’ll share a few of the fixes and features we implemented:
These improvements significantly increased the site’s checkout user experience and functionality, enabling Winter Museo to run a seamless customer purchase process.
Like with every project with such a large scope of work, we encountered significant hurdles. For example, the payment gateway took multiple phone calls and emails with customer support to integrate into Winter Museo woocommerce cart. We encountered several errors with the automated purchase confirmation and shipping emails. However, we methodically tackled each issue encountered, solving them one by one.
After ten months of work on the site, we have revamped every page on the site from home to checkout and added over 2000 products with images, each with their own photo metatags and product descriptions. As I already mentioned, we added multiple new features and custom solutions that improved the site’s capabilities.
We’ve also done work on the content side, including helping write and publish 20 blog posts written with a complete emphasis on ranking on search engine pages. For example, if you google the term “iconic city posters” you will surely see their page ranking among the top 3 results, competing with Etsy.
Winter Museo is now ready for full-scale marketing of the site and its products.
It was a pleasure to work with the company’s founder, Shea Roggio. The mutual satisfaction was such that we have collaborated on multiple projects in several domains of work since then. He has even offered to be used as a reference, so If you’d like to speak with him, let us know, and we’ll get you in touch.
As you just saw, we can handle any web design challenge, from a small personal website to large web shops with thousands of products. Hit the button below, check out what we offer, and let’s get in touch!
Thank you for reading this web design case study. If you are interested in more of these case studies here are some of them:
