Background
Focus Camera, a family-owned business since 1966, has two retail locations, a dedicated team of hundreds of employees, and millions of online customers.
Due to numerous issues with the legacy headless frontend application of their site, Focus Camera was eager to move quickly to a more standardized solution from the custom and unwieldy platform they were on. They wanted a secure frontend built on Magento that leveraged the rich functionality and modularity of Adobe Commerce.
Challenges
- Mitigate potential conflicts and disruptions
Aligning infrastructure with running processes and integrations when rebuilding an online store poses challenges due to the need to ensure seamless compatibility between existing workflows, integrations, and the new infrastructure. This involves navigating complexities such as data migration, maintaining uninterrupted operations, and addressing potential conflicts or disruptions that may arise during the rebuilding process. - Maintain existing SEO value
Remodeling the data and managing SEO for the newly created site, especially one previously operating under a different address, posed challenges during the rebuilding of the internet store due to the intricacies of redirecting existing URLs, preserving search engine rankings, updating metadata, ensuring proper indexing of new pages, and mitigating potential disruptions to organic traffic flow — all critical elements in maintaining the site's online visibility and search engine performance. - Remove redundant, incompatible, and outdated migration remnants
Leftovers from migrating from Magento 1 to Magento 2 at the database level, along with remnants created for a previously running frontend application, were challenging. These leftovers included redundant data structures, incompatible configurations, and outdated code, leading to complexity in the development process. - Ensure seamless team cooperation
The Focus Camera team was deeply involved in the implementation activity. Collaboration between two teams located in different time zones is always a challenge. Misaligned working hours can hinder real-time communication and coordination.
Adobe Commerce
Adobe Commerce provides a comprehensive set of features, including advanced product management, flexible pricing options, powerful marketing tools, and extensive customization capabilities. With Adobe Commerce, Focus Camera can easily scale their online stores to accommodate growth in traffic, sales volume, and product offerings. The platform can handle large catalogs and high transaction volumes, ensuring reliable performance even during peak periods.
Snowdog Sparq
Focus Camera knew they wanted to work with the Hyvä theme for their site rebuild and Snowdog had a comprehensive solution in their Snowdog Sparq offering. This foundation is built on the Hyvä Theme with the Hyvä Checkout and other fully vetted third-party modules for optimal efficiency and performance. This approach was central to achieving the desired benchmarks of quality, fiscal efficiency, and timely delivery.
Snowdog’s Magento 2 Menu
Magento 2 Menu is a powerful menu configurator created by the Snowdog team that empowers online merchants to create advanced menus, enhancing their customers' shopping experience and improving SEO. This module acts as a robust alternative to the traditional category-based top navigation present in Magento and Adobe Commerce. Yet, its versatility extends far beyond, allowing for the creation of menus tailored to diverse purposes and adaptable across multiple store views.
OpenSearch
OpenSearch is an open-source search and analytics engine that provides fast and scalable search capabilities. Snowdog combined this with the ElasticSuite module, which is specifically designed for eCommerce platforms like Magento. It offers advanced features such as faceted search, autocomplete suggestions, typo tolerance, and relevance tuning. This solution significantly improves the search experience for customers.
Adobe Commerce Page Builder
Utilizing Adobe Commerce Page Builder to manage content offers a seamless and intuitive solution for creating, editing, and organizing content. This tool allows users to customize layouts, add multimedia elements, and optimize content for different devices, ensuring a consistent and visually appealing experience for your customers across desktop and mobile devices.
Accessibility Features
Digital accessibility is crucial for online store owners to consider, as it ensures that all users — including those with disabilities — can access and navigate their website effectively. By prioritizing accessibility, store owners can also comply with legal requirements. The Snowdog team, as accessibility specialists, made sure that the new Focus Camera online store meets accessibility requirements. This included providing keyboard navigation, implementing adequate color contrast for readability, providing compatibility with screen readers, providing captions for multimedia content, and making forms accessible to users with disabilities.
AWS Infrastructure
Using AWS infrastructure in conjunction with GitHub, AWS CodeBuild, and AWS CodeDeploy allows for the creation of an automated pipeline for artifact building and deployment. GitHub serves as the repository for the source code, AWS CodeBuild automates the build process by compiling the source code and generating artifacts, and AWS CodeDeploy automates the deployment process by deploying the artifacts to the appropriate environments. This setup streamlines the development workflow, ensuring consistency, efficiency, and reliability in the deployment of software updates.
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