ARgENTUM Apothecary - eCommerce Website Case Study

About the Project

In June 2015, ARgENTUM’s trusted developer of over 3 years needed to find a replacement for himself, and set out to find a person or team capable of taking over the ongoing development of the brand’s Shopify based site and online storefront.

The role called for changes to be occasionally made on what was a beautifully creative site, but ultimately one which was exceptionally difficult to maintain, expand and wasn’t terribly search engine friendly. Perhaps worst of all, it wasn’t mobile responsive, and there was a drastically scaled back and inferior mobile theme for the store that wasn’t doing justice to a large segment of the store’s visitors.

Initially, ShopCreatify took up the role of maintaining the existing storefront for ARgENTUM with a medium term goal of completely rebuilding the store. Roughly a year later the overhaul was embarked upon with the brand’s creative director Sam Gray heading up the design in conjunction with their talented illustrator, and ShopCreatify providing an advisory role to ensure that it was built with an equal balance of usability, search engine friendliness and improved content management abilities.

With a highly iterative approach the store was built over a number of months with some pages, sections and parts of pages or designs being replaced or even discarded along the way. While we built and refined the store’s many interesting and unique sections and pages, new designs and new iterations of existing ones were supplied and implemented.

Finally, in June 2017, the site was deemed ready and we soft launched the store with minor adjustments made based on real world feedback.

ShopCreatify now fills the role of providing consulting services, enhancements and the addition of new features and functionality since ARgENTUM can now easily manage their own content. The site is also up to speed in terms of search engine friendliness, mobile responsiveness and of course it has a fresh, clean new appearance.

At a high level, the project was broken down as follows:

Discovery

As with all projects we do, there was a period of discovery when, amongst other things, it was determined this project was far too custom to use an existing premium theme as a base.

With the designs still being created at the time of kickoff, much of the project was impossible to scope out in the beginning. As such, a flexible schedule was put in place whereby a good deal of regular communication between all involved parties was required and catered for. To meet this need, we used Basecamp as opposed to our usual Trello workflow due to the sheer volume of tasks.

There were also numerous mini-discovery phases along the way where solving a particular issue, whether design, code, UX (user experience) or content management was discussed and decided upon.

Design & Build

On some projects a waterfall method is followed where every piece of the design is painstakingly created before any development is embarked upon. This was not one of those projects.

The design and development was done at the same time, with new designs and elements supplied by ARgENTUM's designer as we went. This surely made certain aspects of the build take slightly longer, but the end result was undoubtedly better.

Testing of the visual consistency, functionality and browser compatibility was conducted throughout the project, with ShopCreatify conducting internal reviews and ARgENTUM conducting their own acceptance testing.

With the “soft launch” following deployment, we also had the opportunity to receive and implement changes based on real world feedback.

Deployment

Following such a significant overhaul project, there was naturally a heightened sense of nerves when we eventually made the call to flip the switch and deploy the site.

The deployment phase itself required us to pull another one of our developers into the project to expedite the process of transferring everything from the development store to the live store.

The site uses a number of clever tricks and methods to create relationships between various resources (blog posts with products, metafields and more), so each one of these digital assets needed to be carried across and checked before we could confidently go live.

The deployment went off without a hitch, and only a few inconsequential bits and pieces needed to be polished up in the first couple of weeks.

Enhancements

Since going live and at the time of this writing, ShopCreatify have already added some enhancements including functionality specifically catering for China based customers and the addition of social media for this region and other smaller changes and additions.

Being that ShopCreatify already had a good existing working relationship with ARgENTUM and the fact that this project went so well, we’re happy to continue to do work for the brand and be their ecommerce solutions provider of choice.

Summary

It’s always nice working with someone you’re familiar with, and in the year preceding the redesign, a good deal of respect and trust was built in both directions, and this relationship contributed to an excellent result for the project.

The visual style of ARgENTUM is second to none, and it’s a brand we’re proud to be associated with.

In terms of search ranking ability, device responsiveness and content manageability, and even the significant increase in sales following launch, this project could only be deemed a success. We hope ARgENTUM are as pleased with the outcome as we are.