Dalby Firewood
Dalby Firewood supplies high-quality, sustainably sourced hardwood logs and wood products across the UK from their base in North Yorkshire. Supplying both trade and retail customers, they offer a variety of wood species in different volumes, from crates and bulk bags to starter/sample boxes. Dalby Firewood’s certified Ready to Burn hardwood benefits from fast local and nationwide delivery.
The Brief
We built Dalby Firewood’s bespoke website 10 years ago. It has been their sole route to market and a business management system from which all operations run. Looking to re-platform their website to ensure business continuity and future-proofing, the brief was to create a new website that looked and felt as much like the legacy website as possible, while redeveloping functionality in WordPress and WooCommerce.
A business-critical tool, the new website required extensive customisation of WordPress and WooCommerce to meet complex needs.
The Website
From a design perspective, the client loved the previous website and wanted to maintain a high level of recognition. Reworking the navigation to make it more intuitive, we modernised the design while retaining essential elements of the user journey.
Visitors are required to enter their delivery postcode on first view to customise pricing to include delivery. This provides transparent prices and an efficient buying experience. Extensive customisation of the WooCommerce pricing matrix was required to handle 16 price variations per product, due to customer sector and associated VAT and delivery calculations.
Modernising the design and layout provided a clean, simple, easy-to-navigate interface recognisable for existing customers. A product finder was introduced, allowing customers to filter products and quickly drill down to find what they need. Product descriptions are supported by additional icons to help make the right choice.
All business operations go through the website. This includes scheduling deliveries and customer notifications for time slots. Bespoke code was developed to meet business-critical requirements.
With over 10 years of historic order data imported into the new website, one of the challenges faced was speed. The volume of data, combined with third-party components and limitations within WordPress, impacted user experience and needed to be addressed. We refactored third-party functions to provide a fast customer experience and efficient back-end operation.
Re-platforming such a website and management system of the size and age of the legacy system was challenging. While extensions for WooCommerce are readily available, there were none that met all the complex needs of the client’s operations. Employing our technical expertise and problem-solving skills, we custom-developed code to encapsulate all of the client’s requirements.
The Result
Dalby Firewood has a comprehensive WooCommerce-based e-commerce website that meets business requirements and is sustainable. The client now has the option for new marketing features via WordPress plugins, which was an important part of why the legacy system needed to be re-platformed. Prior to the creation of the new website, had the client wanted new functionality, it would have had to have been custom-developed, and at a price.
With their new website, additional functionality can be introduced quickly and more cost-effectively, as well as having the ability to be supported and maintained by a larger pool of developers.
Visit: www.dalbyfirewood.com
