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Hair Health & Beauty PTY LTD is a South African online retailer of hair and beauty products that operates two large websites: The company is a client of my own retainer client Gnu World (a South African digital marketing agency). To that end I have worked on this project since early 2019 as the lead SEO and digital marketing specialist. Initially the sites were operating on the Magento eCommerce platform and much of my attention was devoted toward keyword research, on-page  and technical SEO optimization as well as toward working together with the client’s Magento developers in an effort to improve the sub-optimal website performance (page speeds) of the websites. With the sunset of Magento 1 the client decided to shift their development retainer to Gnu World and to re-platform their websites onto the WooCommerce eCommerce platform. As such a significant amount of my work in the latter half of 2020 and up until the time of writing has included working very closely with Gnu World’s and the client’s staff to ensure both a smooth transition from one platform to the other whilst at the same time improving on website functionality and processes. The projects have been highly complex and some (but not all) of my responsibilities have included:
  • Mapping out all Magento functionality and identifying equivalent or better functionality via third-party plugins from the WooCommerce ecosystem as well as identifying where custom development would be required.
  • Identifying the best data migration services to use.
  • Outlining website theme, hosting and software requirements to provide a foundation for good website loading times.
  • Setting up a wide range of tasks for Gnu World’s design and development staff and doing quality checks of completed work as well as assisting with troubleshooting across a wide range of issues as they emerged.
  • Managing Gnu World’s junior staff across manual content migration and styling that the project’s required.
  • Identifying compromises for CSS styling classes for frequently erratically styled product descriptions.
  • Hands-on performance optimization of the websites using a wide range of methodologies so as to ensure fast loading times.
  • Management of all SEO considerations (migration of SEO meta, schema, setting up of all redirects, tracking, etc.)
  • Integrating, setting up and where necessary providing the client with training for third-party SAAS’ (Klaviyo, Re:Amaze, etc.)
  • Ongoing client liaison throughout.
At the time of writing both sites have been successfully re-platformed onto WooCommerce (Hairhousewarehouse.co.za in March 2021 and Hairhealthbeauty.co.za in July 2021).