The Lighting Place - Three Generations in Electrical Supply
Website Development, Custom Plugin, with Hosting & Maintenance
Website Development and Custom Plugin
The Beginning
The website first started its life being developed elsewhere, but there were issues getting the product data in place due to the disparity between the supplier's stock lists.
The project was eventually handed to us to find a way forward.
The Solution
The solution ended up being to simplify. Smaller import functions were written to allow for closely related attributes to be imported at a time.
This allowed us to leverage the built in import for the initial rounds of mass import, but provide a more user-friendly experience when managing the stock.
Huge Number of Categories means Massive Menu Loading Times
Most people wouldn't consider the effect that a dynamic menu would have on the load-time of a website. But in the case of The Lighting Place, with hundreds of categories, fetching them from the database each time a page loads would add huge load to the website. Especially if they had a sale!
The Solution
We overcame this simply by saving the current state of the categories to a non-database driven storage location. Meaning that the menu compiles in a fraction of the time.
Other Improvements
As well as the issue surrounding the import data, during the development we realised that there was no simple way to identify duplicates and deal with them.
The Solution
So, we also created pages in the custom plugin for duplicate identification and merging of products.
