Portfolio / Arian Financial Planning
Arian Financial Planning
Arian Financial Planning provides award-winning independent financial advice to people from all walks of life.
Archives: Projects
Andrew Berry Jewellery
Andrew Berry Jewellery is a well-known independent jewellery business in South Wales.
The Brief
Redesign and redevelop the existing online store. The current website was slow, hard to update and difficult to maintain.
The store needed custom functionality, an overhaul of the shipping rules, additional payment gateways, an optimized customer journey, and a way to reduce cart abandonments.
The Approach
Andrew and Louise Berry had a clear idea of how the website should look from the outset – so we worked with them closely to design a classic eCommerce store with pastel color scheme to bring a fresh feeling to the site.
Site speed and page editing
We tackled the issue of site speed by building a lightweight custom theme with no extraneous code.
Plugin usage was reduced with custom coding.
Pages that had been bloated with page builder code were rebuilt with custom fields that continued and improved on editing flexibility.
Images were optimized and lazy loaded to improve time to first byte (TTFB) and reduce page load time.
CSS and javascript files were minified and optimized, and caching added to help serve up pages quickly.
The htaccess file was tweaked with best practices.
Custom functionality
We introduced points and rewards to reward customers for purchases. The system encourages users to register in order to earn points which can then be redeemed as a discount.
We also added engraving options on engravable product pages. A minimum and maximum number of characters can be set along with a choice of font and the option to charge for the service.
On the checkout page we added a giftwrap and card option so customers can now have their orders wrapped in store and include a personalised note.
The Result
Since launching the new site sales have increased while the number of cart abandonments have decreased.
There is an improved customer journey – the path from product to checkout is quick and clear, and the checkout now offers attractive shipping and payment options.
Case Studies / At The Bench
At The Bench
At The Bench is an online video jewellery training site for anyone interested in learning to make jewellery, from beginner right through to professional level. It currently boasts over 20,000 active members.
The Brief
At The Bench needed a brand new full-featured and powerful membership solution that would allow them to stream secure video content to its members.
They wanted to build a learning community that sparked creativity, a place where members could share their work and receive constructive feedback from fellow members and the Bench support team.
It was also vital to import 20,000 PayPal and Stripe recurring subscriptions from the old system to the new without a hitch, so members retained all their user data and memberships continued to be active.
The Approach
We discussed the project at some length with Andrew the owner and his team until we had a clear understanding about the look and feel they were after, the immediate functionality required and the scope for growth.
We produced mock-ups that illustrated the appearance of the site, along with its architecture and functionality, and then continued to work closely with Andrew to create the membership site he had envisaged.
Built for speed on WordPress
The site is built on the WordPress platform so the content management system is stable, feature rich and easy to use. WordPress is also SEO friendly making it ideal for Google indexing.
A streamlined WordPress theme and custom plugins, as well as carefully selected free modules to enhance functionality, ensure the site performs and delivers speed not only for usability but search engine ranking as well.
Membership
The fully automated membership system allows free and paid access to content. Membership levels and downloadable materials are easily purchased through credit card and PayPal payment gateways.
The project area allows members to create, categorize and manage individual jewellery projects. They can also collect video tutorials and assign them to projects for reference or add them as favourites.
Secure Videos
The training videos are hosted on Amazon S3 servers and delivered to users at high speeds from any part of the world. The custom HTML5 video player is configured to securely play MP4 videos and links are set to expire to ensure content cannot be shared with unauthorized users.
Feedback
At The Bench prides itself on being a friendly learning community so communication between the team and users is encouraged. Members can use the feedback function to send notes, photos and videos of their projects.
The feedback notification system ensures that team and members are notified by email of all messages. Notifications are also clearly highlighted in the project dashboard area.
Image Galleries
All members have a private image gallery to organize their images for personal reference, to display in the public member gallery or to attach to feedback requests.
The Result
At The Bench now has an end-to-end content delivery solution to provide secure content easily to its members and an online learning community that supports and nurtures fellow creatives.
Case Studies / International Institute of Marine Surveying
International Institute of Marine Surveying
The International Institute of Marine Surveying (IIMS) is an award-winning, independent organisation promoting the professionalism, recognition and training of marine surveyors worldwide.
The Brief
The brief was short and to the point. The website had not been updated in over six years so it needed revamping with a modern framework. The layout should remain the same with a modern font introduced and icons and images updated. Plugin use should be reduced where possible to improve performance, reliability and to avoid potential security weak spots.
The Approach
A new lightweight WordPress theme was developed and built on Bootstrap 5, a powerful front-end framework, so the site would be more accessible to users on small devices.
A number of plugins were replaced with custom PHP coding, custom post types and custom fields so the functionality remained but now used streamlined code. Replacing plugins with efficient coding would also lower the strain on resources and help improve page loading time.
WebP Images
Images were optimized to use the latest WebP file format. WebP images are much smaller than commonly used JPG or PNG format with almost no reduction in quality. This allows for a decreased page size which means faster loading times and an improved user browsing experience.
Secure Video and Sound Files
The IIMS provides a wealth of media data to its members in the form of educational videos and podcasts. These files were hosted on Amazon S3 servers so they are delivered at high speeds to users from all parts of the world.
Site Optimization
CSS and Javascript files were minified and caching added to help serve up pages quickly. The htaccess file was updated with best practices.
The Result
A fast, streamlined web portal packed with resources for members that is easy to navigate and easily accessible on desktops, tablets and phones.
Case Studies / Titan Storage
Titan Storage
Titan Storage is a storage company providing secure modern storage facilities around the UK for business and personal use.
The Brief
Titan decided to replace their old third party reservation and booking system with a custom solution that would fit their requirements precisely.
The new system needed to work seamlessly with the brochure website we had earlier developed in WordPress so reservations could be made without leaving the site.
And it needed to connect with the DocuSign eSignature system they were now using at their stores to streamline document and agreement signing.
The Approach
We held discovery sessions with Titan management and their marketing team to ensure business goals, strategy and expectations were aligned.
The produced a series of mock-ups that illustrated the paths between pages and covered the entire customer journey through the various points of entry. The main objective as always an optimised quality user experience.
WooCommerce Development
We developed the full-featured reservation and booking system as a WooCommerce extension so we could utilize the power of the popular eCommerce platform and allow the system to fit seamlessly into WordPress, their current CMS.
Storage units, reservations and payments are now managed through the WordPress CMS and staff have an improved and intuitive booking system that is easy to maintain.
eSignature API
We held a Zoom meeting with the DocuSign sales and technical team to discuss connecting our eCommerce system to their eSignature API.
The developed system later allowed customers the choice of signing the contract immediately after a reservation or postponing it to a more convenient time.
If they chose the later, reminder emails would be sent out to continue the smooth customer journey with a single click.
Go Live
When we had a working model completed we held a further meeting with the Titan and DocuSign team to demonstrate the system as part of the Docusign Go Live process.
The Result
Titan now have a streamlined reservation and booking system with automated critical processes and an improved customer journey to enhance client experience across all touchpoints.
Case Studies / Pantheon Poets
Pantheon Poets
Pantheon Poets is an online collection of recited Latin poems with accompanying Latin text and English translation.
The Brief
Pantheon Poets had the single aim of making the best Latin poetry accessible to people who don’t necessarily know any Latin.
The main target audience would be people studying literature in English or other modern languages, but there was also a wider purpose to make recited Latin available as a valuable resource.
The site needed to reference individual poets and poems, with each poem having its own Latin text with a literal translation, and a sound file of Latin being read aloud.
The Approach
We held a meeting via video conferencing where we discussed the brief in detail and then later sketched out the preliminary architecture of the site.
We worked on getting the feel of the site just right and produced a series of mock-ups that illustrated functionality and the user journey.
Design
We wanted a simple clean and user-friendly design with lots of white space so the poets and poems would be the focus of the site.
We combined white with flashes of black and red to be aesthetically powerful and chose a reddish grey as a pleasing soft background to the poems.
An ideal project for WordPress
To build the site we took advantage of WordPress’s specialized content types. We used custom post types for the poets and poems, and extended them with taxonomies and post object fields to create connections between poets and poems.
Secure Sound Files
The MP3 sound files are hosted on Amazon S3 servers and delivered to users at high speeds from any part of the world. They are played on the native HTML5 audio player.
The Result
A classy, easy to use site that is a great resource for Latin poetry. Since its launch, Pantheon Poets has become an official teaching resource of the Classical Association.