Watchshop

www.watchshop.com

When I started with Watchshop in 2014, after getting to grips with the legacy system and helping the company get through the Peak period leading up to Christmas on their existing site, my first big project came in the form of designing and developing a new skin for the site that would modernise its appearance without straying too far from the original design.

A very important additional feature was to add the 'responsive' factor in order to increase mobile usability which is something that they had in the form of an "M." site at the time. It was extremely basic and virtually useless, with the site's share of mobile users making up for less than 1% of total usage (as proven in Google Analytics).

I started on this project along with the full-stack developer and we started by producing graphical mock-ups of our design "enhancement". We presented this to the management team and CEO a few times to gain feedback and implement any changes or tweaks that were discussed.
After multiple iterations, we produced the final wireframe which was then officially signed-off, and so we began developing it.

This was my first experience with using Bootstrap on a large commercial level (Watchshop was seeing a good few thousand visitors a day) and I quickly got to grips with Bootstrap 3's grid system to a more advanced level, and its other great features.

We spent about 4 weeks developing the new site and we launched it in June 2015.

We kept an eye on statistics over the following few weeks and saw mobile traffic rise quite sharply from 1% to around 45-50% within 5 weeks of launching the site. The advancement from the old one was huge and traffic levels, mobile share, conversion and total revenue soared over the next few months. To this day, mobile usage hovers at around 50% and mobile conversion is over 30%. A huge improvement from sub-1% traffic and 0% conversion!

Mission accomplished.

Since then we have launched 7 international sites based on the same design (France, Germany, Poland, Italy, Spain, Netherlands, Sweden) which are also constantly picking up traffic and revenue as time moves on.

• June 2015

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The Watch Hut

www.thewatchhut.co.uk

The Watch Hut was a competitor for Watchshop so we decided to buy it out and put it to our own use in 2016.
After a settling period, it was the first site that was ported to the brand new custom back-end e-commerce platform that was envisioned and produced by the back-end team at Watchshop.

Once the platform had been confirmed stable and successful, and after ensuring that it was good to go, the next job was to re-skin The Watch Hut to move it on from the design that it had been running for a few years by this stage.

Due to very tight time constraints set by the parent company, and with many other projects going on at the same time, the design had to be outsourced to a design agency which the parent company had already worked with.
This was out of our hands but I was able to work closely with the design team to help design the new look and feel, and this is where my expertise in UX and great aesthetics came into play. Having produced the Watchshop's new site and learnt a lot about the UX required for a watch retail site, I was able to incorporate all of this knowledge in to The Watch Hut's new design.

The resulting design, after a few weeks and iterations after feedback and tweaking, is what is on the site today.

Again due to time constraints and with myself being busy on one of the international site projects, the decision was made to have the HTML/CSS/JS done by the design agency as well.
I wasn't too happy about this but with a very tight deadline looming, there wasn't at all enough time for myself as the only front-end developer on the team to develop the whole new skin in the 4 weeks before deadline.

The HTML/CSS/JS was done and handed to us in segments to that I could start my responsibility of taking lead in integrating the new code with our bespoke platform.
Within hours of starting this, it started to become clear that the code was very poorly done. The JS wasn't working, SASS was not used to any of its advantages, and the HTML was not SEO optimised or well structured.
After a few discussions, it became clear that I would have to do what I could to improve on as much of this as possible while I was integrating it all.
The priority of course was to meet deadline, and so I was given the instruction to prioritise the job of getting it up and running, and fully usable, before the deadline so that it could go live when it was meant to.
So the most important part was of course to fix the JS and re-write bits of it so it would perform how we wanted it to, and I had to add more HTML and CSS to get everything done, and the result was a mish-mash of code that looked great from the outside.

It was sad to have to leave it at this, knowing that the code could be improved hugely, but we just didn't have the time to re-visit this topic due to plenty of other work. Management were happy to leave it as it is, as long as it was live and operational, and that's where it is now.

Hey - at least it looks nice.

• April 2017

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Ultimate Ear

Coming soon

This is a job currently in progress that I am working on with a local company.

It is an e-commerce site that I am writing most of the HTML and CSS for, developed on Bootstrap 3, and is my first experience in using Laravel/Blade to incorporate more advanced functionality.

• November 2017

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• Date: January 2017
• Client: Lines
• Category: Branding

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• Date: January 2017
• Client: Southwest
• Category: Website Design

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• Date: January 2017
• Client: Window
• Category: Photography

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