Vision Wallcoverings

Size: e-commerce site with over 4,000 products

My professional status: independent web designer/developer

Website client: Vision Wallcoverings

Dates: December 2016 - June 2020

Categories: Client liaison, Project manager, Content-loader, Webmaster, Responsive web design/dev, CSS-based layout, CSS3, HTML5, WordPress, E-commerce, Large sites

Brief: Having become the webmaster for New Zealand wallpaper company Aspiring Walls nine months earlier, in December 2016 I was invited to look after the website of their sister company in Australia, on which the Aspiring Walls website is based. Vision Wallcoverings had been supplying wallpaper products to the Australian market for over 40 years. They had one of Australia’s largest ranges of wallpapers and murals designed for both domestic and commercial settings, sourced from producers worldwide and supplying an extensive network of retail stockists nationally.

The Australian dev company that originally built both sites would remain responsible for any dev work that needed doing, while I would take over as webmaster, responsible for the day-to-day care of the website including all of the e-commerce product updates. Being responsible for updates across both sites meant that I could re-use elements such as product images, saving both companies time and money.

Achievements:

• Figuring out how the CMS works and how the website is set up in order to provide the best possible service in terms of updating ranges
• Continually working to improve efficiency of product range preparation and uploads in order to reduce costs
• Initiating a review of the tagging process currently used, and looking to improve this in order to make the website more usable for customers as well as improving the website search speed.

My responsibilities included:

• Client liaison and project management
• Uploading 2-3 new wallpaper ranges to the website each month, having resized and optimised swatch and roomset images and updated the Excel database file each time
• Removing old ranges from the website as required
• Incorporating sales advertising into homepage banners when required
• Figuring out how various elements work eg new wallpapers on the homepage and updating these as required
• Bug-fixing website functionality such as search and image uploading
• Improving the slow search functionality by firstly identifying the cause (huge list of tags in the database) and then fixing it (overhaul of tags list, removing multiple tags from individual products and setting up a new, much smaller set of tags), and developing rules and guidelines for future tagging
• Extensive browser and device testing of my updates on the live site, to ensure that everything looks good and is behaving properly from a responsive perspective
• Ongoing support and help with the site, as and when required.

This was a large responsive e-commerce WordPress website built using a theme by WooCommerce. It has an extensive database of products that was constantly being updated. It was quite straightforward figuring out how the site worked, as I was already familiar with sister site Aspiring Walls, and both sites shared the same theme and many of the same plugins.

The site used WooCommerce product management to organise and order the large number of wallpaper ranges and patterns into a usable website display, and, unlike Aspiring Walls, these products were also sold online via the website. As a result, the websites shared product swatches and roomset images, while using different Excel files to add products to the database. As I got to know both sites better, I was able to work on reducing the time taken to load each new range onto each website, so reducing the costs for both companies.

In June 2020 the Vision Wallcoverings website was taken offline as the company closed down.