Project History
WebCrane has been working closely with British Hardwoods for over 10 years, and we very much feel that we are part of the British Hardwoods family. British Hardwoods were early adopters of ecommerce technology and originally had a website built on OS Commerce. The OS Commerce site was best described as clunky, lacked any clear brand styling, and had poor SEO ranking. WebCrane re-platformed the site onto Magento 1, adding functionality to allow the sale of products with different size units, products with custom options and tiered pricing discounts, as well as integrating the site with Paypal Express, Secure Trading, and Amazon Payments payment methods. Much of the development effort was spent on SEO optimisation, with the result that within 6 months, British Hardwoods was on the first page of Google organic search results for all of their core products. 10 years on, and this is still the case. As the website evolved, WebCrane successfully converted the British Hardwoods site to a responsive design to improve the experience for mobile and tablet users.
British Hardwoods is a proud UK manufacturer and many of their products like hardwood flooring are high value items made to order. This created unique issues that could not be solved by Magento out of the box. One particular client requirement was that they needed to be able to split an order into factory job cards and be able to track the progress of the job cards through the factory. WebCrane designed and implemented a Magento production management / job tracking system that automatically created the job cards from the original order information and allowed them to be scanned at various points in the manufacturing process. WebCrane also implemented a quotation system for telephone orders and linked Magento to Sage 50 accounting. It would be true to say that what started out as an online shop, is now a fully integrated website, quotation system, ERP, and production management system.
More recently, with Magento 1 coming to the end of it’s life, WebCrane has successfully and seamlessly migrated the entire British Hardwoods system onto Magento 2. This was no easy task considering how much complex and bespoke work had to be rebuilt.