Manchester Safety

Project Overview

Manchester Safety came to me wanting an ecommerce site built from scratch: product listings, order management, taking payments, dispatch notifications, the lot. Their customers were mostly buying on their phones, so it mattered that the whole thing worked on mobile first; after all, ecommerce is their business.

The platform was already settled on: Joomla. (Joomla's a CMS, a content management system, the software that runs the site and lets you edit it without touching code.) It gives you a foundation to build on, but you still have to do the building. So rather than start from a marketplace template, I wrote the theme from scratch, which meant no design decisions inherited from someone else's product and nothing surplus carried along for the ride. The CSS I wrote was purpose-built for this site, mobile-first because that's what their customers needed, and kept light so the pages load quickly. When the site is where the money comes in, every extra kilobyte you don't need is weight you're carrying for no reason.

I built the full order pipeline end to end, browse through to purchase, payment, confirmation and dispatch notification, and tested every step of it. I also stripped the Joomla admin back to what the client would actually use, so their team could run the store without wading through config options they'd never touch. It had to work for the customers on the front and for their team on the back, and both got equal attention.

What they ended up with is a shop built around how they actually operate, rather than how a template designer assumed a generic shop should work. The code's clean, the admin only shows the options they'll actually use, and when something needs changing there are no mystery dependencies to unpick first. It'll be straightforward to look after for as long as they run it, which for a business that takes its money through its website is the bit that really counts.