Webretailer - Reviews, blogs, comments and more

Background

Webretailer is an online platform providing the information about eCommarce solutions – open source and available under subscription. Ofering over 700 listings and more than 3000 reviews. The website was moved from bespoke CMS into WordPress.

Objective

Main reasons were simlicity of usage – making it easier for contributores to add their own content to the site – as well as simplicity of future maintanance. As WordPress is an open source enviroment its easier to develop and maintain it without an in depth inside knowladge of the platform and the way it was coded.

Content Audit and Pages Structure

At this stage I audited the Webretailer old site as well as analyse some of the competitors sites. The main obejctive of this exercise was to find our what are the good features of the current site what are the bad ones. The competitors audit helps with surfacing the good features of the competitors sites which could be incorporated into a new design. Flashing out the issues allowed us to avoid making the same mistakes on the new site.

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Low fidality design phase

Based on the audit as well as project outlines I started creating mockup of the new site using first Balsamiq – low fidality designs – this allowed me to mockup all the most important funcionalities, pages and templates in much faster manner.

High Fidality mockup and designs

The next step was which than could be tested with stakeholders and end users.

I used Adobe XD to create them which allowed us to create an interactive mockups which were useful during the testing rounds.

New Website Development

Based on the design we stared on creating the new WordPress website from scratch. We used several different plugins to support more complicated functionalities of the site like Comments, Reviews and Listing pages.

All of these functionalites have been hooked into and injected with addtional or changed fucntions to meet the project requirements.

Challenges

Due to the high complexity of some the site functionalities I needed to produce a lot of custom code which hacked into the plugins used by the site.

Please visit the site here: https://www.webretailer.com/