Web Dev for E-Commerce Company
Featured Review- Web Development
- $10,000 to $49,999
- July - Nov. 2022
- Quality
- 4.5
- Schedule
- 5.0
- Cost
- 5.0
- Willing to Refer
- 5.0
"Throughout the whole project, they stayed proactive, professional, and supportive."
- IT Services
- Germany
- 51-200 Employees
- Online Review
- Verified
Naturaily provides web development services for an e-commerce company. They have built the client's Jamstack website using Netlify, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS, and Storybook.
Naturaily’s new site is fast, light, ultra-flexible, and very interactive. Their team was reliable, assertive, professional, responsive, and understanding throughout the entire project. They communicated frequently and responded promptly via Storyblok, ensuring an effective workflow.
The client submitted this review online.
BACKGROUND
Please describe your company and your position there.
Best IT is one of the leading eCommerce companies in the German-speaking / DACH region. We have more than 100 developers, UX designers, consultants, solution architects, analysts, and project managers, spread over 4 offices in Germany and Austria. Using these skill sets, we provide solutions for every step of the digital commerce process and digital transformation.
They range from strategy and advising, through user experience and design, to the creation and management of eCommerce platforms across all channels and devices. As Co-Founder and Chief Customer Officer at Best IT, I support companies on their way to digital excellence by selecting and implementing future-proof technologies for a better customer experience and digitizing retail processes.
OPPORTUNITY / CHALLENGE
For what projects/services did your company hire Naturaily, and what were your goals?
Before starting the project with Naturaily, our website had been built and run following a traditional monolithic architecture, with WordPress as our content team's basic tool. This limited our workflows: disrupted the team’s control over content management processes and required ongoing support from the development team to make changes to particular pages.
We wanted to give our marketers more autonomy and flexibility, and doing so would mean huge time and resource savings. With the new version of our website, we also wanted to reflect our eCommerce and web development expertise.
We needed to relaunch the website to make it more appealing, modern, and useful, especially in the areas of design, UX, content management, SEO strategy execution, and performance. Our new website would have to be ultra-fast to provide users with a great experience and enhance our Core Web Vitals.
That’s why from the very beginning, we intended to switch to the Jamstack approach and implement Storyblok as the headless CMS of our choice. An experienced and Jamstack-savvy technological partner was needed to process this change flawlessly, and Naturaily eventually became such.
SOLUTION
How did you select this vendor and what were the deciding factors?
To complete and manage the architecture change process, we required our partner to showcase its know-how and skills within a particular technological stack.
We set a few conditions they would have to meet:
- Deep understanding and proficiency within the Jamstack approach, backed by actual success stories of creating websites expandable with the use of APIs and microservices
- Strong competence to transform the design system into a dynamic front end based on JavaScript frameworks such as React.js and Next.js
- Compelling ability to significantly enhance site performance
- Proven experience concerning headless CMS implementations and content migrations, namely around the Storyblok CMS ecosystem; as it turned out, Naturaily is a Storyblok’s technological partner, and this gave them strong leverage
On top of that, what precisely made us choose the Naturaily team was that they were able to quickly verify business requirements and then propose and implement the most accurate solutions.
Describe the scope of work in detail, including the project steps, key deliverables, and technologies used.
In order to achieve the goals, it was necessary to change the stack and monolithic architecture more comprehensively to Jamstack.
Our Jamstack website was to be constructed differently than the previous one: the front end and back end would become separated and hence could be independently developed, which gave a lot of flexibility.
Having finished the business goals’ verification stage, this process of layers decoupling was one of the first objectives we headed for. The next stage was all about turning our designs into JavaScript-based components that would be the basis for page creation within the Storyblok interface.
Naturaily recommended Next.js, a React-based framework created by Vercel for building websites in a scalable way. It is best suited for projects that involve a variety of different components, and ours was an example of such.
What distinguishes this approach from others is that thanks to Next.js, websites can be technically static while still having a lot of dynamic aspects, and this is what we eventually, and happily, went for.
Other important stages worth mentioning:
- Preparing WordPress to Storyblok content migration
- UX and CX adjustments implementation
- Creating and deploying particular pages’ with the use of Storyblok Naturaily also offered a maintenance package for our developers that included software updates and the ability to create any new components as required by the client.
Technological stack:
- Storyblok (headless CMS)
- Netlify
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Tailwind CSS
- Storybook
How many people from the vendor's team worked with you, and what were their positions?
Our core services are quite similar, so we split some responsibilities regarding project management and planning, and crafted a realization plan together. This included also the composition of the team:
- 1 Jamstack Developer (Naturaily)
- 1 Project Manager (Naturaily)
- 1 Head of Marketing (Best IT)
- 1 Head of Design (Best IT) It was we who prepared designs, yet the development and implementation stage was Naturaily’s responsibility.
We worked in the Agile methodology (sprints).
RESULTS & FEEDBACK
Can you share any measurable outcomes of the project or general feedback about the deliverables?
First and foremost, the transition from monolithic to Jamstack was handled skillfully. Together with a well-thought-out approach to the CMS change, this made us better prepared to prove to our DACH customers we’d be their digital partners of choice.
What’s more, Naturaily’s work changed the content marketers' experience for the better tremendously. Based on the given designs, we received 70 different React-based, modular and customizable components, broken down into templates, organisms, molecules, and atoms.
They are accessible through Storyblok’s visual editor in a way that gives content marketers a great deal of freedom to control the specific site's appearance and feel. They see changes to the page immediately before it’s even deployed.
What’s more, unlike web builders that provide a comparable capability for quickly changing a website's appearance, the Jamstack method combined with headless CMS doesn't worsen the site's performance.
Actually, the performance metrics went up, and this had been expected. Our website is now quick, light, and ultra-flexible, and this ultimately helped us improve Core Web Vitals notably. Important metrics like Largest Contentful Paint or Time to Interactive boosted, and this additionally strengthens our SEO visibility.
Because the front end and back end are isolated from one another, we’re also able to easily scale the website up using APIs and microservices. This new Jamstack architecture and the fact that our developers equipped themselves with all the needed know-how, allow us to be more flexible, faster, and more independent.
Describe their project management style, including communication tools and timeliness.
We’re delighted with the quality of work we’ve done collaboratively, and this wouldn’t have been possible if Naturaily were unfit for clear communication. Their team is fully prepared to communicate within the realities of remote working effectively.
They proved to be the right technological partner for us: efficient, responsive and at all times focused on finding alternative, goal-oriented solutions. We felt supported at every stage of the project, yet they managed to remain reliable and assertive all the way.
The project may be described as a charming example of collaboration between two businesses that provide comparable services, during which a positive vibe and understanding were consistently experienced.
What did you find most impressive or unique about this company?
Throughout the whole project, they stayed proactive, professional, and supportive. Whenever we encountered a challenge, we knew that their creativity and knowledge in headless CMS implementation would allow us to move forward with ease.
From our experience, they understand the value of the Jamstack architecture and are extremely proficient in providing services that bring their clients towards more composable technologies.
With the new site and the know-how gained through our cooperation, we feel even more equipped to support our clients, and this was the main goal when we began the project. Naturaily is definitely a recommended partner and was highly determined and successful at adding value.
Are there any areas for improvement or something they could have done differently?
They could have estimated the scope of the work more accurately and passed the development know-how more thoroughly, yet these would be the only things to stress out here.
RATINGS
-
Quality
4.5Service & Deliverables
-
Schedule
5.0On time / deadlines
-
Cost
5.0Value / within estimates
-
Willing to Refer
5.0NPS