1300 382 777Lighting Illusions | Enhancing User Experience & Streamlining Sales with an Innovative React Website
- Website Development | React | UI/UX Design
Digital8 recently designed and developed a new website for Lighting Illusions , a leading Australian retailer specialising in lighting and fans. The new public-facing website was one of several digital projects Digital8 was appointed to deliver for this client, including a website rebuild for sibling company Ceiling Fans Direct.
The Lighting Illusions teams’ vision was for the new website to create a smoother user experience by improving product awareness and ultimately boosting sales both online and within their physical retail stores. With these goals top of mind, the Digital8 productions team commenced the agile-based website development project with a project initiation, followed by a discovery sprint where the team completed in depth research and consultation with key stakeholders within Lighting Illusions. During these stages, the project requirements were identified and prioritised by Digital8’s project managers and core development team.
Once the site’s requirements were defined, the Digital8 productions team kicked off the website development project in close collaboration with the client.
Digital8 has completed additional websites in the Lighting Illusions suite of websites, and is currently working on another project with this client, as well as providing support, maintenance and enhancements to the launched websites.
The Problem
The main issue causing the Lighting Illusions team to request a new website was that the old website was underperforming (both from a user experience and SEO perspective) and was experiencing stability issues. The older Lighting Illusions website also required an update to newer frameworks that would be better suited for rapid changes when needed for new feature updates post-launch.
Understanding the Business Objectives
To effectively address the website problem, the Digital8 productions team listed some key business objectives for the project that were ascertained through the project initiation and discovery sprint. These included:
- To improve overall user experience on the site to drive increased product awareness, purchases and conversions
- To re – establish the Lighting Illusions site in terms of SEO performance
- To ensure increased flexibility for new features within the site
Our Process
1. Scope
The project scope was defined through multiple scoping workshops with the client during the early phases of the project.
The first stage was to identify the feature groups of the site including: categories, labels, checkouts and products. Secondly, the Digital8 productions team needed to define the requirements of each feature group. This stage included identifying whether each category needed to have a child category, if categories needed to have products, if products needed to be filterable as well as configuring other essential category requirements. The third stage saw prioritisation of feature groups (using MoSCoW) followed by capturing the project scope within Jira tickets. Lastly, Digital8’s project managers began delegating the work through prioritised Jira tickets for the core development team to action.
2. Design
Design took place over a series of sprints, working from the highest priority items down to lower priority ones. A key component of design for the website included a full e-commerce functionality with an integrated payment gateway. This was implemented as a high priority task by Digital8’s developers.
A comprehensive search functionality was also designed and built into the site to make it easier for customers to find and navigate to their desired products.
3. Development
In parallel with design, development was executed over a series of sprints.
Built using Laravel and React technologies, the website was integrated with marketing automation software Omnisend and NetSuite ERP. During development, Digital8 progressively tested the site to ensure optimal user experience and that site functionality aligned with the clients end goals.
Continuous testing allowed the development team to ensure the sites full responsiveness and high performance across multiple devices including: mobile, tablet and desktop.
4. Deployment
During the deployment stage, the site was deployed and databases were migrated to ensure that no data was lost. Product data was also re-indexed after migrations across both sites, and finally, domains were cut over.
The Challenges
The main challenges presented by this project included; maintaining the existing site whilst developing the new site, as well as ensuring that all changes made to the existing site were also present within the new site.
Working in a mono-repo repository that contained all of the code for both the Lighting Illusions site and additional sibling sites (in addition to all the backend code) also provided the development team with a complex codebase to manage and navigate.
By communicating regularly, openly and honestly, Digital8’s development and productions team were able to identify these time sensitive, technical challenges and come up with suitable solutions to address these challenges.
Our Solutions
For challenges involving maintaining the existing site whilst developing the new site and ensuring changes were consistently updated across both sites, the Digital8 productions team made sure core developers were scheduled with extra weekly time within scope to complete these duplicate and time-consuming changes. An extra developer was also added to the project to provide additional support with managing these changes. This provided the development team with enough time and resources to maintain and update both sites effectively throughout the project.
The technical challenges presented by working within the mono-repo repository proved to be slightly more testing. However, this challenge was managed as best as possible by the development team by implementing good testing practices and regular code reviews to minimise impact on the project. Lighting Illusions was also notified and made aware of this challenge, any impacts it had to the project timeframe, and were advised of Digital8’s proposed management solutions.
Despite the challenges causing some minor setbacks, the solutions identified and proposed by Digital8 allowed the project to continue running smoothly and efficiently.
Outcomes
Lighting Illusions brand new website was successfully launched in November, 2023. Digital8 also provided ongoing support post-launch to ensure the stability and security of the site.
Our Digital8 productions team met Lighting Illusions business objectives for this project by:
- Enhancing navigation across multiple pages and various categories within the Lighting Illusions site and thereby, improving user experience to drive increased product awareness, consideration, purchases and conversions
- Improved on-page SEO optimisation, page load speed and technical SEO to drive increased search engine optimisation rankings and performance for the Lighting Illusions website
- Implemented newer development frameworks and packages, allowing for increased flexibility for new features within the site
Through consistent communication and ongoing collaboration, Lighting Illusions remained updated with Digital8’s progress throughout the project. This clear communication and constant client collaboration ultimately led the project to a successful outcome.
Post-launch, the Lighting Illusions website continues to prosper.
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