Project
Nick Ireland
One online store selling to Australia and the United Kingdom
Nick Ireland is a master jeweller and diamond merchant, working from a studio in Brisbane, seeing clients by appointment in Melbourne and Sydney, and registered in Hatton Garden, London's jewellery quarter. He makes engagement rings and wedding rings by hand, and holds one of the more serious collections of Argyle certified pink diamonds you will find online. Five hundred rings, dozens of rare pink stones, and customers in two countries buying from the same website.
Project Scope
- Ongoing WordPress and WooCommerce development
- Custom product catalogue and filtering
- Site navigation for a large range
- Australian and UK storefront
- Speed and search performance
- Hosting, testing and maintenance
The challenge
Fine jewellery is not shopped for the way most things are. Somebody looking for an engagement ring narrows down by setting style, then stone shape, then stone colour, then metal, then carat weight, and they do it over weeks rather than minutes, mostly on a phone. Every one of those combinations has to land somewhere that feels like a proper page rather than a jumble of search results, because that is also how people find the business on Google in the first place.
On top of that, the business sells in two countries. Somebody in London should see pounds and a London phone number without being sent off to a different website, and that choice needs to stay put while they browse. Running two separate sites would have meant two catalogues to keep in step, which for a range this size goes wrong quickly.
What I built
The store runs on WordPress and WooCommerce. What I build and look after is everything that makes those cope with a catalogue of individually made pieces sold into two countries, plus the hosting it all sits on.
A catalogue built for jewellery
Every category page, from 501 engagement rings down to a shortlist of 44 loose pink diamonds, is built by software I wrote rather than the one that comes with WooCommerce, which has no idea what to do with jewellery. Each page carries its own filters, its own count, and a trail back to wherever the shopper came from.
Navigation that holds the range
A three level menu with pictures in it, so nobody has to start browsing from the top of the site. Engagement rings alone have more than forty ways in, by setting style, stone shape, stone colour, metal and carat weight, and each one of those is its own page.
Two countries, one shopfront
One control in the header switches the site between Australian dollars and pounds. Choose pounds and the phone number becomes the London office, and the choice follows the shopper around the site instead of resetting on every page. Underneath, the currency and the language are two separate systems that I tied together, so a customer only ever sets one thing.
Looked after, not just launched
Hosting, software updates, speed, and a private copy of the site to try changes on before they go anywhere near the real one. Most of what goes wrong on a store this size goes wrong quietly, so the value is in somebody noticing before a customer does.
Across the site
The engagement ring catalogue, 501 rings behind one set of filters
The pink diamond collection on a phone
The result
Nick Ireland runs the whole business through this site: the ring catalogue, the pink diamond collection, the guides that bring people in from Google, and the enquiry forms that fill the appointment book in Brisbane, Melbourne, Sydney and London. Australian and British customers buy from the same store and neither of them notices the machinery.
This is a long running relationship rather than a build and a handover. New features, product work, speed and search fixes and the hosting all sit with me, which means a problem gets solved once instead of bouncing between a web developer and a hosting company.
If you sell something people think hard about before buying, where the range is complicated and the website has to do the convincing, I would like to hear about it. Have a look at how I approach WooCommerce development and WordPress consulting, read about the MDT DESIGN store, or get in touch.
Common questions about this project
Yes. This one serves Australia and the United Kingdom from a single website. One control in the header switches between Australian dollars and pounds, and the same switch changes the contact details a visitor sees. It is much less work to run than two separate sites, and there is only one catalogue to keep accurate.
With a purpose built catalogue rather than the one that comes with WooCommerce. Engagement rings alone can be browsed by setting style, stone shape, stone colour, metal and carat weight, which is more than forty different ways into a single category. Each of those is a proper page with its own filters, so it works for shoppers and Google can find it too.
Usually not. A lot of my work is on sites that already exist and already earn money, where starting again would throw away years of search rankings and customer habits. The first job is normally to get the site somewhere reliable, fix whatever is quietly costing you, then build from there.
Rarely the obvious things. It is more often a filter combination that returns an empty page, a product that stops showing up after a stock update, or something slowing the site down that nobody notices until enquiries dip. Because I run the hosting as well as the development, those get picked up in one place instead of being passed back and forth.
Yes. Jewellery suits the work I do, because the range is complicated, the purchase is a considered one, and the website has to do the convincing before anyone walks into a showroom. I work with clients across Australia from a base in Geelong.
I do. Hosting, software updates, speed, backups and new development all run through me on an ongoing basis. A store carrying several hundred products builds up risk quickly if nobody is watching it.
