Mark Schneider Design

How a premier jeweler took web performance to the next level!

Mark Schneider is an award-winning jeweler who specializes in contemporary designs. He is known for creating jewelry with clean, fluid lines, reminiscent of works of art. He is one of the most recognized American designers of our time and has earned some of the most coveted awards and honors within his industry. For example, he is one of the few living designers to have a piece of jewelry on permanent display in the Smithsonian Institution.

THE CHALLENGE

Drupal Performance Enhancements

In 2018, Mark Schneider Design hired North Studio to resolve serious performance problems that were negatively impacting their newly built site. The site had thousands of high-quality images of premium diamond and gemstone designs, but no caching in place. Its shared hosting solution was also dragging down performance. These factors were causing over 30 second page load times and many customers were leaving the site before the designer’s work displayed.

This was a big problem for Mark Schneider, who needed a site that reflected his achievements and properly showcased his designs. These performance problems were such a setback, the jewelry designer considered scrapping its recent e-commerce rollout to rebuild the site. North Studio analyzed the site’s infrastructure, carefully considering possible solutions and determined what would solve these problems while keeping the e-commerce implementation in place.

The Design (A Scrolling Representation)

THE SOLUTION

A Premiere Hosting Partnership

After all analysis and research was completed North Studio was determined to find a hosting partner that could, well, perform — and perform big. Who did we chose for the job? Pantheon! Read the full Pantheon case study to learn how they helped add value for our client.

North Studio was confident that Pantheon could support the jeweller’s multi-site environment and the migration to the new environment was seamless. Among other things, the North Studio team set up daily backups for more than 3.5 terabytes of data, aggregated CSS to improve performance and enabled auto-caching.

What We Did

Fully update all Drupal website and fixed minor issues after the updates, tested and deployed to the production environment.
Remedy Javascript errors which was causing most of the frontend functionality to behave in an erratic way.
Applied a number of security measures which stopped the site from being infected by spam bots.
Enabling Redis and Varnish on Pantheon, the load time of the website reduced to a fraction of a second.
Easily changed the PHP version to 7.1 from the Pantheon interface.
As a second priority we focused on the tasks to improve the user experience and help the back-office administrators better manage the site and store.
Built a pricing calculator using the variables from the product fields and automated the pricing of every sub product and the main product which saved the client a lot of time.
Custom module creation to auto update sub products without dealing with the images, categories and pricing one by one.
Created a mechanism for the end users to contact the client directly on certain deals instead of forcing them to make a purchase online for the very expensive products.
Created another feature for sub products to easily override images on certain categories to save content managers time.

Support + Maintenance

Our partnership with Mark Schneider grew quickly after fixing the main issues of the website but a living website constantly requires maintenance. North Studio continues to update Drupal core and the contributed modules regularly, along with adding new features to the website for a better UX Design, Web Strategy, and improve the content management experience.

We were relieved that North Studio was able to find a way to keep our site but solve the underlying problems. They saved us from a redesign that would have cost thousands of dollars.

– MARK SCHNEIDER DESIGN

BEHIND THE SCENES

Rubies & Diamonds aren’t the only thing we love lookin’ at.

Visual design, UI, & UX is pivotal if you want your users to engage your site, create meaningful interactions, and convert in calculated and projected ways. That’s what we’re known for, setting up award-winning websites, and creating the marketing engine behind the scenes to take organizations to the next level.

Don’t let your competitors get the edge on you, and give us a ring to find out how we can help you and your project out as well.

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