After 2.5 months in creation, we’ve just launched the new MiH Jeans website and we’re all extremely proud of it.
The goal of the website was a huge platform refresh – removing some of the old technical flaws in the system we had inherited and improving the website hugely in terms of –
- the story told by the site – MiH Jeans has a superb, loyal and growing following, they don’t need to lead with “buy me now” products on the homepage – the goal was to put brand and design as a priority, pare down the site somewhat and improve the shopping experience for website visitors globally
- simplifying navigation throughout
- removing a lot of standalone pages and moving them into a new responsive popup framework (which has now become a Magento extension for us)
- SEO positioning and structure of pages
- optimising the site load time and speeding up and already-fast website
Magento website redesign
Design-wise, we went from concepts, wireframes and storyboarding to redesigning of about 80% of the website.
For Magento development, we rebuilt the site using the Zurb Foundation framework – starting with responsive from the off. We had spent a long time debating using some of the standard responsive Magento structures that have been created and ditched them all – they were bloated and clumsily built. So we started again, building on top of Foundation but specifically for Magento. Despite additional effort up-front it’s paid dividends later in development for us.
At the same time as launching their new site they’ve also launched their Spring/Summer 2013 collection. So that meant tens of thousands of URLs needed to be rewritten – without going into technical details, we’d rewritten old URLs to new URLs in just over one day for the entire site and ran it against a large test set we’d already created and it passed ready for go-live. We also worked closely with MiH Jeans to deliver the images required for front and back product shots, headers, wash colours … a lot of new collateral.
Magento optimisation
We’ve optimised most of the CSS and Javascript throughout the site – to achieve 95/100 for Google PageSpeed but we’ll take it to 100 when we optimise further and introduce a CDN for them in the coming months.
We are delighted with the new website. It looks beautiful, works extremely fast and despite just over 2 hours of downtime while we switched over from the old to new site (early morning UK time as this powers both the US and UK sites), within 3 minutes of launch they were back taking their first order.
We went to the pub to debrief on a demanding but superb week with the LogicSpot team on Friday eve after work. While sat there, our client sent us a link – they’ve just been featured in Glamour magazine as one of the best online stores to buy jeans – a nice way to finish the week!
