Matter of Stuff (MOS) is a furniture procurement and manufacturing consultancy that provides a new approach to curating knowledge, network, and crafts to transform impossible dreams into materiality.
The website, matterofstuff.com is playing a vital role not only in presenting the business online but also taking the products and services to a global ordinance.
Unfortunately a number of critical technical issues blocked their digital marketing strategy and MOS had completely lost the faith in web development. However, upon a recommendation by another DigitalBee Labs client, we got the opportunity to help this client.
Expertise Used
- SEO
- R&D
- Ruby on Rails / Spree
- E-commerce
- Amazon Web Servers
- Multiple meta descriptions
- Missing H1 and multiple H1
- 500 error pages
- Duplicate titles
- Non-indexable pages on sitemap
However the MOS website was live by the time this request was made and it was being maintained by another technical team. Generally, handling this kind of a task without having full access to the technology stack is cumbersome and even challenging to deal with while there is another technical team actively working on it.
The website was developed using the spree commerce platform but an old version of it with some outdated features. On the other hand, the DigitalBee Labs team didn’t have previous experience with Ruby on Rails or Spree Commerce
A careful review of the technology stack and codebase helped us to uncover the depth of these bugs plus many additional issues including;
- Application architectural issues and bad programming practices
- User interface issues
- CMS issues plus data errors
- Code errors
- Performance issues
However, fixing all those issues was a very costly and time consuming task and the client did not anticipate such a major investment just to get them unblocked for their digital marketing strategy.
Our technical team had few initial meetings with the client to understand the issues they were facing and their objectives. After carefully analyzing the information they provided, the team proceeded to the next step to review and validate the queries with the live website. This step was to understand and decide the level of access we would need in order to continue further investigations plus apply necessary fixes.
The team then clearly communicated the right access they needed to proceed with the task and they could manage to professionally work with the on-duty technical team. Communication and flexibility was the key for us to work collaboratively and efficiently with the remote technical team.
While the team worked on reaching this stage, A full stack developer was assigned to prepare for the technology. That was as per our initial plan to accomplish this task.
Our industry experience and deep understanding on these kinds of technical issues, helped us to uncover the depth of these particular issues. A root cause analysis was used to understand and then decide necessary short term and long term fixes. Original issues and the issues we identified by the team were put into the same list and then they were prioritized based on criticality plus original list. Our fixes were mainly oriented towards fixing root causes of the application rather than tweaking the patches to the code.
It took only two weeks for us to complete the task and deploy them for UAT. All fixes could be deployed to production within three weeks (From the initial client meeting to live release). The team was able to build a positive impression on website development and a green light for this client’s digital marketing strategy.
2. The approach.
Our technical team had few initial meetings with the client to understand the issues they were facing and their objectives. After carefully analyzing the information they provided, the team proceeded to the next step to review and validate the queries with the live website. This step was to understand and decide the level of access we would need in order to continue further investigations plus apply necessary fixes.
The team then clearly communicated the right access they needed to proceed with the task and they could manage to professionally work with the on-duty technical team. Communication and flexibility was the key for us to work collaboratively and efficiently with the remote technical team.
While the team worked on reaching this stage, A full stack developer was assigned to prepare for the technology. That was as per our initial plan to accomplish this task.
Our industry experience and deep understanding on these kinds of technical issues, helped us to uncover the depth of these particular issues. A root cause analysis was used to understand and then decide necessary short term and long term fixes. Original issues and the issues we identified by the team were put into the same list and then they were prioritized based on criticality plus original list. Our fixes were mainly oriented towards fixing root causes of the application rather than tweaking the patches to the code.
It took only two weeks for us to complete the task and deploy them for UAT. All fixes could be deployed to production within three weeks (From the initial client meeting to live release). The team was able to build a positive impression on website development and a green light for this client’s digital marketing strategy.
3. Results
- Fixed all original issues raised by the client
- Fixed additional issues found during the process
- Google search console issues started to decrease
- Website loading speed increased
- Increased organic traffic
- Happy client
4. Benefits
- Client could invest time and budget on new features / technology upgrades
4. Benefits
- Client could invest time and budget on new features / technology upgrades