AlohaHawaiianFlowers.com
Miva eCommerce Budget-Conscious Build
Aloha Hawaiian Flowers delivers the spirit of the Hawaiian islands right to your door with their expertly crafted arrangements. Celebrations, memorials, and simple acts of kindness are elevated with their stunning fresh flower and potted plant options. Aloha Kakou and Mahalo Nui Loa!
Budget-conscious and economy builds are tightly-run ships that help small businesses stay afloat. By giving a new look and advanced functionality to small Miva stores, they are able to grow, without over-extending.
The Client
Colleen Ashton, the proprietor of Aloha Hawaiian Flowers, aims to deliver the spirit of Hawaii with every order. Offering a range of custom and pre-made bouquets, leis, gift baskets, and more, it’s easy to feel the love.
Based in Hawaii, the Aloha spirit isn’t just a theme or gimmick for Colleen and her staff. It’s a daily way of life, and they ensure that their customers discover that with every delivery. They offer a variety of services like their 100% Fresh Flower Guarantee and their Flower Of The Month club to ensure their customers have every opportunity to experience the island love.
Colleen approached us about a site redesign during one of the most stressful economic times of the 21st century. As a small business, Glendale Designs knew that the project would need to be as budget-conscious as possible, in order to make this viable. So we started out on planning a Miva eCommerce Budget-Conscious Build.
The Challenge
After ten years, Colleen’s well-loved site, Alohahawaiianflowers.com, needed some TLC. As one might expect, after a decade of business without any significant design or functionality upgrades, it was high time for some changes.
- Fresh and elevated design. When selling products that are purely aesthetic and luxury, it’s important to reflect that in the design of the website. The colors, images, and general layout/theme of the site needed a new coat of paint to be able to keep up with the beauty of the products.
- Responsiveness. Responsivity was a must, catching up with the advancement in technology over the past 10 years. Aloha Hawaiian Flowers would needed to become responsive and adaptive, able to cooperate with mobile devices.
- General functionality. Keeping pace in a competitive market means being able to, at least, match the functionality of your competitors (and we like to take it a little further than that). Just as the site needed a fresh new look, it also needed some structural work for a smoother user experience.
Coming to us at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic… we knew that the build would need to be budget-conscious, tightly run, and expertly timed.
The most important challenge of all with this particular build would be the careful planning. Coming to us at the height of the COVID-19 pandemic, and as a small business selling “non-essential” items, we knew that the site build would need to be budget-conscious, tightly run, and expertly timed.
Our planning specialists worked closely with Colleen through every step of the project to ensure that it was on track and she was happy with the outcome. As always, prioritizing tasks, features, and additions to the site were an important part of the scheduling.
The Solution
A Contemporary Design
After weeks of careful yet bold work, the new AlohaHawaiianFlowers.com launched with resounding success. The new design combines a clean and open layout with exciting imagery and colors. The result is fresh and modern, without being cold. It’s bright and striking without being overwhelming.
By updating the site to a responsive theme, it can now handle an encompassing layout that uses all the available screen space. This allows for a lighter feel and the more complex features that are necessary for impressing today’s eCommerce shoppers.
The modern look and feel was carried throughout the site. Details like smooth zooming, information tabs, and custom design elements ensure that the product pages are as user-friendly as possible.
Product-Specific Functionality
Like many other eCommerce sites, Aloha Hawaiian Flowers has certain restrictions due to their product type. There were, of course, specific shipping restrictions to set up according to different state import laws. But Colleen also needed a way to control delivery restrictions.
The calendar-based checkout gives the shopper extra control over their order while also ensuring it falls within the right parameters. Providing Colleen the ability to dictate on which days products can be delivered means the guesswork and additional customer service time is taken out of the ordering equation. Instead of entering a preferred delivery date, shoppers are now able to select from an interactive calendar during checkout.
The client wanted this type of functionality to be a priority in the construction of the site. Our project manager made certain to balance the development of special features like the calendar with the rest of the work. This ensured it would fit within the budget-conscious build.
Data Work
As with all other builds, much of the project budget is allocated to importing, restructuring, and fine tuning the data. Reorganizing content and data may not have the same visual impact as design, but it plays an important role in how the site functions.
We built the category structure and content pages alongside Colleen. We wanted to make sure that they would make sense in the design of the site. Furthermore, we also wanted reflect her business goals and her shoppers’ habits.
Finally, in order to protect existing data and improve site visibility, our experts meticulously implemented our comprehensive technical SEO plan. We are confident that the clients ranking will measurably improve after launch.
Triaging Post-Launch Tasks
While the project budget was tight, the vision for the site is grand. We relish being able to make all of our client’s dreams and goals into reality; in the case of a Budget-Conscious Build, that reality will need to come in stages.
Through working with the client, we were able to formulate a plan that allowed us to get a beautiful and sophisticated site up and running without breaking the bank. Other tasks that weren’t necessary for launch were then relegated to a “post-launch” task list.
The post-launch task list allows Colleen to decide when and how she’d like to proceed with further additions. She can continue to add to the site in a way that keeps her budget entirely under her control. This task list includes some items like a reward points system, and third-party channel selling. While they would further enrich the user experience, not having them doesn’t diminish the site functionality or the user’s perception.
The Results
Through meticulous planning and realistic goals, we were able to work with the client to settle on a realistic and attainable budget. That allowed for the completion of this stunning Miva eCommerce Budget-Conscious Build: exactly what was needed to refresh a small business during global hardship.
If you’ve been considering a new site build but the price tag has been holding you back, get in contact with us and speak to our eCommerce specialist. We can work with you to find solutions that are permanent and buildable, giving you a stable base for further expansion when the time comes.