What we did?

We did our homework and evaluated several different eCommerce platforms. The conclusion was that Magento would provide the most flexibility and functionality with enough support from the developer community to continue dominating the market. To get cracking, our first project was developing the Sister Lilian Remedies website for Vital Health Foods in conjunction with Imagine Advertising. Things went really well!

Sister Lilian website

The success of the Sister Lilian Remedies eCommerce website proved that Refresh had made the right choice with Magento. Comments from the client – Andrea du Plessis at Vital Health Foods:

Thanks for all your stunning work – the team is very impressed.
Kind regards,
Andrea

Next up, Refresh created store-fronts for Bach Remedies and Burgess and Finch – both Vital brands. These two stores were built to run off the same Magento installation as the Sister Lilian Remedies site, which meant that everything was accessible through one administration panel.

Bach website

Burgess & Finch website

Having become Magento experts, Refresh then developed the Orms Direct eCommerce site, which sells Photographic equipment and the Wolf Brothers eCommerce site to sell jewellery online.

ORMS website

The Process

In order to ensure a smooth rollout of a Magento eCommerce site we follow the following recipe:

• 1x generous helping of wireframes. These are basic schematics of the site to show the basic positioning of functional elements.
• 2x batches of designs. These are flat images that look just like the site, but are not yet developed.
• 1x healthy dollop of static site. The static site is the front-end but isn’t linked to Magento yet, which means that it can’t be updated easily.
• Several scoops of Magento customisation and integration. By customising and integrating Magento with the static site, everything starts to work.
• 2 heaped cupfuls of Payment Gateway integration. In order to accept payments from the website you need to have a payment gateway.
• Many tablespoons of testing and quality assurance. To get everything ready for your shoppers, you need to make sure everything works on all browsers.
• 1 teaspoon of Go Live. Going live should be accompanied by a glass of champagne.
• 2 Cups of Search Engine Submissions. Let the search engines and their users know where you are.

After this, it’s time to serve up your site to all your online customers.