We've worked with Senua Hydroponics for many years, creating the original website well over 10 years ago, and developed other versions of the site that had not been created in-house. So, it wasn’t a surprise when they invited us to build this iteration.

There were some caveats to this version of the site and a few internal issues that were being ironed out as Huyton Web Services became part of the new website project. We were happy to add our knowledge to the discussions and help in the overall decision.

Name change?

The first discussion that tabled was a proposed name change. The word ‘Hydroponics’ has some negative connotations it might not have had 10 years ago so, before we started any brand change or website development a decision needed to be made whether to drop the word Hydroponics from the brand altogether and they’d simply become ‘Senua’ or change it to something else like ‘Senua Horticulture’ or ‘Senua Garden centre’.

There are always pros and cons to a change like this, especially with a brand that has been around for such a long time. Here are the ones we added to the discussion:

Cons

• Paper based logos would need to be scrapped and reprinted e.g. branded boxes.
• Sticker cover or repackage stock.
• Vans would need new livery.
• Signage would need recreating.
• Digital marketing would need changing.
• New domain.
• Organic SEO would become obsolete for hydroponics.
• Paid for SEM would need replacing.
• All products with back links would need redirecting to new name.
• Newsletters would need creating and sending to let customers know of the change.
• On site logos would need "used to trade as Hydroponics" adding in some way.

…The list went on

Pros

• Senua Hydroponics would not be associated with Hydroponics. This might actually be a con for people who worked in the hydroponics business.

At this point, the decision was made, and the name Senua Hydroponics was to stay. The name Senua Horticulture got as far as domain name

Caveats

Before we started this project there were 3 caveats that we needed to account for.

1. Stock and warehouse management had been managed though a program called Linnworks with a move to Veeqo in the pipeline.
   This meant any content for product had to come from Linnworks and Huyton Web Services would not have control over product content. This wasn’t a problem as we are experts working with many CMSs, Linnworks is just another to have experience with.
2. The website was to be created in Shopify.
   We have worked with Shopify before and although it’s slow in some contexts, it is an excellent system for ecommerce.
3. We would work with the in-house team for content, graphic design, and overall project management.
   This meant working with a new team with some potential for upskilling and training, which was great news again because at Huyton Web Services, we are passionate about sharing the knowledge.

Wordpress backup

The original website was on a CMS called Wordpress, and while this is a useful CMS and very easy to upgrade it can easily be slowed to a crawl, made unstable and/or insecure by 3rd party modules or leaving it to go stale. All of this seemed to have happened here! There was an unknown program running hourly taking up all the memory, the site hadn’t seen any updates for a number of years and upon running our checks was very slow.

Our first action is usually to back-up the content, but because the content was saved in Linnworks, not Wordpress then pushed in via an api we did not need to backup content. Images where all on Google drive and Linnworks and video was in YouTube so there was no backup to do.

Brand

The next action is to look at the brand and see where the holes are. This was all in place and the client did not want to change too much for the reasons above. This was great news because we could use the colours, logo, tone, etc. we already had.

Sitemap and wireframe

These 2 are usual parts of any website architecture, and Senua Hydroponics was no different. For the sitemap the usual ecommerce sitemap was in correct, but we also had a Blog and some news pages to add, plus the bricks and mortar shop was a USP (Unique Selling Point) the client wanted to really get across.

Once the Sitemap was created, we started to look at the Wireframe. As with the Sitemap this was a normal fair for an ecommerce website, but as usual, we needed a few additions. In this case the USP blocks, and home page blocks needed fleshing out a little differently. This is where the power of Shopify comes in with its section and block system allowing the client to change parts of the system shown to a visitor at the click of a few buttons. For our Wireframe this meant we could add in any blocks the client may want to use but could switch and move as the block was finished.

With the client having an in-house team this meant they could add and remove parts of the site, update the hero images and generally keep the site up-to-date as the business strategy changes.

Design - Theme or bespoke?

In any project we (Huyton Web Services and the client) make the decision to use a theme or build from scratch and both build strategies come with their own pros and cons. We will not go through them all here, but it comes to stripping down a theme or building up from scratch to get to the same point. In some cases (when the design is completely bespoke for example) it is easier to build from scratch, but in some cases a theme is the way to go. As in this case.

We chose to go with a theme, and we chose the Align [https://companyxyz.io/products/align] theme as it was one of the only themes that had ‘click’ for the main menu instead of ‘mouse-over’. We will not go into this UX problem and solution here as hover vs click in UX is a large topic, but a using click can cause higher purchase rate for a large navigation like Senua Hydropionics so we chose click.

Building

There is so much to go through and so many decisions to make before we start the actual build, but there will come a time in any project where we start to put everything together. At this point in the project, changes are not really an option, so we make sure all the dots are dotted and the tees are crossed before we enter this phase of the project. Changes should usually come after the build phase and some of these are:

• bug fixes
• issue changes
• tweaks
• new functionality

In some projects this would be the time we would need to ‘shut up shop’ on the old site with a ’Coming soon’ page or something similar depending on the architecture, but in this case, we had a ‘development’ version of the website we could develop behind a password while the old site was still in place and still taking orders. Perfect.

We created the site in Shopify, changed all the settings that need changing, add the apps we really needed to add, imported the products from Linnworks, then installed the theme and removed the unfinished parts (for example empty blocks). At this point we had a site that looks ok, but was missing:

1. Any Branding
2. Product extras (e.g. reviews)
3. Up-sell from products
4. Hero images
5. Blocks of products (like Your Environment)
6. Footer content
7. Contact pages
8. Blog content
9. Menus
10. USPs and pages for the USPs

We methodically built the website 10 unfinished parts above, the graphic designer created images for hero banners and USPs, developers adding blocks and styling, wordsmiths changing and creating content for SEO, marketing, and correct English and the website took shape.

At one point we lost all styles and code due to an update of the theme, luckily, the developer had a backup of the code and we where able to re-instate the code only losing 2 days.

Warning: Do not update anything without speaking to your developers, it can lose time and money.

As the website started to look like the Senua Hydroponics website, we have today we worked with the client and kept them up-to-date, but one everything was in place and the build phase was complete, and we presented to the upper management for any last tweaks.

Making it live

At any point in the build phase the client should be able to say, “that is good enough” and we can put the website live. The website should always be in a state where (with minimal effort) it can go live. A graphic designer may say the Hero image is not perfect, or a developer may say we still have 3 more blocks to add but some things can be completed after a website is in production. Sometimes, by not putting a website live we could be losing money as the site being built is ‘better’ than live.

When going live we have to think about the returning visitors to the site and in this case, we decided to send out a newsletter with a voucher.

Once this was sent, we ‘pushed the button’ and went live. The old site no longer available, the news site taking all traffic. We monitored the website closely for the first few hours and tested the live visitor pathways and all was working as expected.

In the case of Senua Hydroponics, the site was in a ‘finished’ state when we went live, but the team could add and change blocks and hero banners as the business strategy changes. Huyton Web Services worked, and still work, with the team from Senua Hydroponics to keep the website just right, but the in-house team complete the majority of the work.

Disaster!

After the website had gone live and as Huyton Web Services were handing over documentation and completing some of the last blocks, we had a disaster. The top-level navigation menu items went blank and lost all product links. This affected search and the main menu on both mobile and desktop. Also, over 300 products lost their descriptions and had the description from the category they belonged to.

We stopped everything and first fixed the problem so there was as little effect on visitors as possible.

Next, we checked logs, retraced steps, and tried to find the root cause to make sure this never happened again.

In this case there where 3 issues that happened around the same time.

1. An app for grouping products had been installed.
2. Bar codes had been created.
3. Linnworks had stopped updating products and errored.

The culprit for all the issues was the app for grouping products, it changes the products (duplicating and hiding) on install. While this is fine for a website that has product descriptions on Shopify, when the descriptions come from an external source like Linnworks if meant Linnworks could not find products that had been grouped.

In the background the team had to:

1. Remove the offending app.
2. Recreate over 300 products.
3. Update the navigation for all products.

This cost around a full week of work for a full team.

Warning: Do not install apps without full testing.
It might be 1 click to add, but it can cost your business time and money.

Finishing up

This project will be ongoing as the market and seasons change but the website itself can handle these changes for a long time to come.

Working with the team at Senua Hydroponics was a joy and we at Huyton Web Services wish them all the best. They are passionate and articulate, so could explain how they work, and they would listen when we needed something changing. We’ll continue to work with the team to keep the website just right.