The Brief (and Problem)
Massage & Float is a local business located in Sydney’s eastern suburbs. The previous website has been neglected over the years, a common issue among small and medium-sized businesses.
The website was developed in WordPress and had over 40 plugins, competing theme layers and page builders. This among other ‘neglected issues’ has made the website impossible to maintain both visually and technically. There were also many irrelevant pages with either irrelevant content or actions such as forms leading to nowhere. This is not only a bad user experience but mostly affects reputation and integrity.
The site also suffered from accessibility and SEO issues such as missing meta tags, wrong HTML formatting and long page meta descriptions. Broken links, 301 and 404s required immediate attention as well.
My task was to ‘gutter’ the website and rebuild it from the ground up while maintaining its high Google ranking (due to mostly its age) most pages, content and layout design.
The Process
The rebuild of the website had to be managed carefully and in steps to keep the content and design intact and the budget under contorl. The steps I’ve taken:
- Complete site audting. This included backend structure, plugins, themes, code, database, broken links, media, SEO and accessibility structure.
- UX auditing. How customers experience the website. Loading times, CTA and logic, sample carts and ordering flow, content presentation and information architecture.
- Setting up a staging clone and disabling all unnecessary plugins (more than 40), themes and templates. Stripping off the website front-end UI and understanding what governs the UI and page templates.
- Cleaning up the database, batch processing media and deleting orphan code.
- Designing new theme templates and components such as the header, footer, page and blog layouts.
- Setting up a consistent and scalable style guide.
- Removing ‘loose ends’ such as orphan forms, 404s, 301s and any action that is not user-friendly.
- Pre-launch tests, evaluations and change management.
The Outcome
The outcome is a website using a fraction of the code, optimised, has a centralised theme and style manager, logical IA, optimised media and HTML structure to meet W3C guidelines and AA accessibility scores.
The website is easy to manage by the business owner or other professionals with minimal training or additional services and plugins. Marketing campaigns can be created in a fraction of the time and cost while maintaining brand integrity and a logical user flow.
