Sparks Electrical OpenCart Rebuild

Posted by AlexDobson on May 18, 2022

Near the end of 2020 we were tasked with updating a very tricky custom built OpenCart store for a company called Sparks Electrical. They are a well established company based in London and had an outdated OpenCart store, running on version 1.5 for 10 years! The site hadn’t been touched for a very long time and featured a lot of extensions/modules that were now redundant, which we waded through to discover.

There were some legacy features they wanted to keep such as the Ranger CSV Import, the Database Export Extension and the Required Products section that had to be specifically added to the admin panel. There were other extensions that they wanted porting over but didn’t have an OpenCart 3 version, so we researched other available extensions with equivalent functionality and 'migrated' the settings between the old and new extensions. One of the significant advantages of OpenCart is you can fine-tune your store to your exact needs, unlike with the restrictions imposed by platforms such as Shopify.

Sparks1.jpg

This was a significant project to undertake, in every sense of the word, but it was helped due to us sticking by our 2-Step Strategy for Handling Complex OpenCart Rebuilds. This meant we were able to break the project down into Phase 1 & 2, which made testing a lot more straightforward than it would have been if there had only been only one phase. This necessitated a complex requirements gathering process to ensure their shiny new site worked the same manner as their current site. We worked with them to determine the 'core functionality' of the website, seeing how they used the site everyday.

Once Phase 1 was complete, they were able to test the development site and point out what was missing compared to their current site, thus allowing us to build up the specifications for Phase 2. Our designer Chris did a fantastic job with the designs and made the site look like a refreshed version of the old site using our flexible CCS based iStore Theme.

Sparks2.jpg

So if you have a complex OpenCart site, with niche custom work, and you would like your site to be upgraded, then as you can see from the above we are more than capable of undertaking this for you. Please email your requirements to info@antropy.co.uk and we would be happy to take a look. 

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