The team at Paul Morrell Formalwear in Little Rock, Arkansas approached us to completely overhaul their online catalog for men’s formalwear. They wanted something that allowed for casual browsing of the catalog, but would also be powerful enough to allow users to quickly filter and search based on many different product attributes using reductive navigation.
MyTuxedoCatalog.com Finished Product
This was a pretty ambitious project for us, since most of the sites we had developed in the past typically contained static content. We were committed to using WordPress as our CMS platform, but knew that this project was going to take a lot of custom code to create a seamless user experience.
A major concern with this project was the fact that MyTuxedoCatalog.com was already a popular site that had very good keyword rankings in all of the major search engines. We made Search Engine Optimzation (SEO) an even higher priority than usual with this project because we didn’t want the re-design to negatively affect site traffic. We were already implementing some of our standard SEO practices (WordPress XML Sitemap, Keyword usage, Page title optimizations, etc), but we took it even a step further by implementing a custom Product Sitemap that is dynamically generated every hour and submitted to Google.
Another one of the client’s concerns was the ability to easily add new products, while also having the ability to quickly manage existing products. With the previous version of MyTuxedoCatalog.com, adding products was difficult and required someone to hand-code the HTML for each product page. When a new product page was added, links to that page had to be added and updated in several places. This process became cumbersome and caused delays in updating the product catalog.
In order to solve this problem, we developed a custom WordPress plugin that would allow anyone at Paul Morrell to login and easily manage products from any category in their catalog. Now a new product can be added in just a few minutes and will immediately appear in all site-wide searches.
New Product Management Plugin
The previous homepage design was simple and minimalistic, but looked dated and required too many clicks for a user to find exactly what they were looking for. We really wanted to create a clean, modern site design that would present more information on the homepage in an organized manner. The final design utilizes patterns, textures, and shadows to give the site extra depth.
Old Homepage Design
New Homepage Design
Knowing that the reductive navigation functionality was one of the key considerations with this project, we wanted to design something that would be easy to navigate, but wouldn’t overwhelm the user with too many options. The final design utilizes jQuery to hide extraneous filters that the user might not want to see by default.
Old Product Listing Page
New Product Search Page with Reductive Navigation
New Product Detail Page
This project definitely presented some unique design and technical challenges, but we are extremely pleased with the final product. If you’re looking to re-invent your company’s presence on the web, contact us and let us know how we can help take your organization to the next level.
501.291.3595
