Puravent: Scaling Magento ecommerce for a specialist ventilation retailer

Design and UX

A project kick-off meeting was held with the client, our technical lead and our head of design. We went through all aspects of the website in detail including existing functionality that needed to be implemented along with all the new features and how they would work.

We wanted to fully understand the business and what it offered its customers in order to come up with a fresh design that was easy to use and navigate. 

With there being over 30,000 products spread across hundreds of categories – along with a very comprehensive resource blog covering all aspects of air treatment – we started with looking at the site structure and coming up with a new sitemap.

After this, we wireframed the site, planning the whole user journey and defining how all features, such as the calculator tools, would function.

Over a number of design meetings the user journey was finalised and a full design was created in Adobe XD. Particular attention was given to the main navigation and the user journey through the sub-categories.

The site was ultimately given a complete design refresh, but was in keeping with the Puravent branding.

Website build

Once the design was fully signed off and approved, the build phase of the project started. The spec included advanced Magento as well as bespoke functionality. Some of the key features of the site were:

• Products with tiered pricing
• Enquire for price feature for products with a hidden price
• Customer enquiry including a trade enquiry form
• Product comparison
• Supplier PDFs such as manuals added to products
• Custom Puravent branding to be dynamically injected into these supplier PDFs
• Calculators for various heating, ventilating and air conditioning applications
• Blog containing Insights and Videos
• Ability to save PDFs of product pages and blog posts
• Custom CSV import/export for bulk editing thousands of products at a time

Magento migration

As Puravent was replacing an existing Magento website, we had to migrate data from the old site to the new site including all products and categories, customer data and all historical order information.

Because products on the new site had additional functionality, a custom script had to be written to carry out the migration.

Launch

As some time had passed since the initial migration, once a go-live date was agreed upon, we would have to run our various migration scripts again to make sure all the latest product customer and order data was moved across.

On the day of go-live, before office hours (in order to minimise disruption with customers ordering) the live site was taken down and a maintenance page was put in its place. 

This would ensure that no data on the live site would change as no orders could be placed.

At this point, we re-migrated everything so the Magento 2 site was fully up to date. We then worked through our go-live checklist which included creating 301 redirects. 

Redirects were put in place as the Magento 2 site had an updated URL structure which was more SEO-friendly. So, a user attempting to view a product on the Magento 1 site, would automatically be redirected to the correct URL on the Magento 2 site.

After some extensive testing, the DNS was updated and the maintenance page taken down making the new site live!