THE NATURAL SHOPPER - CASE STUDY #1

The Natural Shopper (TNS) (www.TheNaturalShopper.com) was formed in 1999, inspired by a company called 'Ancient Herbs' who specialized in Standardized Herbal Supplements.

TNS developed their product line way from Standard Herbs into a more niche area, focusing on products from the beehive, including bee pollen and royal jelly products.

Though SEO was still a relatively new concept back in 2000, TNS took all of the right approaches in developing a very content rich website, information packed pages and a plethora of links, all optimized for their main keywords. This resulted in very successful organic search listings, supplemented by Google/Yahoo PPC campaigns.

The website was built up on the FrontPage platform and the limitations of the software soon became a burden on making wholesale website changes. Upgrading to Dreamweaver in 2005 gave them a little more versatility, but the reality was that their web platform and methods of administering changes was holding back the development of their website.

A detailed analysis in 2009 made the call for change even louder, but at the same time added some significant obstacles to progress. Analyzing over 180 pages of content it became clear that the website had evolved in a 'random' fashion, presenting a somewhat confused browsing experience to the visitor. Many 'obsolete' pages were firmly embedded in Google's index and it became 'too risky' to delete or restructure them. The owners had looked extensively at options for changing the design platform, including CMS options like Joomla, but had never had the courage to take the step forward for fear of "upsetting the search engine gods".

SHOPPING CART WOES

The tipping point came in Summer 2009. Having grown their shopping area around ProStores, with around 170 products in the catalog, word came from their ProStores hosting company that they were discontinuing support for the product and closing the doors on ProStores February 28 2010. The obvious step was to migrate ProStores away from their existing 3rd Party reseller and hook-up directly with ProStores HQ, now owned by eBay.com. On further analysis, it was found that the transition was not going to be that simple. The template language used by ProStores had significantly changed somewhere along the line, but TNS's 3rd Party ProStores reseller had not implemented the changes, so it was going to take a major redesign of the ProStores cart templates before the site could be migrated to ProStores / eBay. Also, eBay's pricing policy required a 0.05% commission on all sales to be made to eBay, on top of the monthly hosting fees. The fees were also something of a concern, around $170/mth for hosting and ProStores seemed disproportionately high when looking at other hosted solutions.

So working closely with us at COL Svcs, TNS set about the task of finding a replacement for ProStores that would provide similar cart functionality and allow for a fairly quick setup and transition.

VirtueMart was explored in some detail, along with offerings from Volusion, Zen Cart, X-Cart and several others including Miva. There was still an understandable reluctance at TNS to change the site over to a CMS system, for fear of losing standing with Google and Yahoo, but a compromise position soon unfolded.

It was decided to install Joomla in a sub-directory of the root server and run the cart on a Joomla installation on a remote domain, as ProStores had run. The Joomla install on the main website would allow for the development of a new 'Article' and resources section and the slow migration of static HTML pages onto the Joomla platform. Since some recoding of the static pages was necessary to incorporate links to the new cart, it was decided to install a more modern theme for the HTML pages, to match the Joomla theme used for the cart pages. COL Svcs developed the theme and completed the extensive changeover on around 180 pages in under two weeks.

Content was unchanged as pages were transitioned to the new theme, only the HTML template was changed, along with the navigation and linking structure. Despite the fairly comprehensive code changes, the website did not slip from its ranking positions in any of the major search engines and actually remained unchanged in Google.

As it stands now, the platform has been implemented for the gradual migration from HTML to Joomla, and the process can be implemented in slow steps to ensure the sites organic SE rankings are not disrupted.

The site has actually seen an improvement in conversion rates with the implementation of Virtuemart, which provides a more stable and intuitive shopping experience than its predecessor, ProStores.

Modular functionality is steadily being added to the website utilizing Joomla and WordPress. A company blog, remote from the main website has been established, its purpose being to act as a data reference for readers/visitors, without encumbering the shopping process on the main website (Royal Jelly Blog)

The new cart and changeover of the HTML theme, and setup of the Joomla article database was completed in under four weeks with zero down-time for the website or shopping area. Monthly hosting costs have dropped from $175 to under $30/mth.

Though not necessarily a 'clean' or perfect situation, the goals of implementing a new cart and adding a CMS platform for site development without disrupting organic SE listings were all successfully met.

CH

May 2010