The previous Shop at Freemasons’ Hall site was outdated and no longer fit for purpose. This meant the BigCommerce platform opened up a host of exciting possibilities.
Our UX and design team looked to bring higher levels of accessibility to the new site. This is reflected in the clear layout, with sufficient colour contrasts and strong calls-to-action present.
The online store was launched in conjunction with upgrades to the physical store at the Freemasons’ Hall in London. This meant the online store needed to reflect the positive change seen in the physical space in the digital arena as well.
With these goals in mind, the Un.titled team set about implementing the BigCommerce store, setting up the configuration for payments, currencies, tax, shipping, returns, product labels and one-page checkout.
Having liaised with the Freemasons’ Hall team and carried out benchmarking workshops, we selected a specific BigCommerce theme. Our design team then applied colours and typefaces to reflect the Shop at Freemasons’ Hall branding and accessibility standards.
We also carried out Retail Management Hero order integration with Shop at Freemasons’ Hall’s point-of-service software. This sees orders imported directly from BigCommerce and updates them in the BigCommerce system once they have been processed.
Our digital marketing team also set up 301 redirects in order to preserve as much organic traffic as possible from the old site.
One particular challenge was moving the shop’s domain. This was managed by working closely with Freemasons’ Hall’s in-house IT team to make sure the domain name system was set up correctly and all the SEO redirects worked as they should.
To make things as easy as possible for the Freemasons’ Hall staff moving forwards, we put together a bespoke user manual and delivered some training on BigCommerce for staff.
We also set up Google Analytics for the site to add to the native analytics of BigCommerce to help monitor performance. And we are providing ongoing support to the team.
Initial feedback from the Freemasons’ Hall team has been really positive, with store admins commenting on how much easier their store is to manage now. The new BigCommerce platform saves them time and effort and generally makes things much easier.
“We worked with Un.titled for well over a year on this project – which was a lot longer than either of us had anticipated but was neither party’s fault,” explained Perry Bushell, Head of Trading at Freemasons’ Hall. “Throughout that time, the team at Un.titled were uniformly excellent, coping with all our questions and requests in a very professional manner."
“Their team developed a very close working relationship with key personnel that we hope will continue post-launch and into our support arrangements. We have very specific and unique products and I am sure we had some out-of-the-ordinary requirements but nothing we asked for surprised them. The new site is a massive improvement on the previous one and a much better user experience for our customers. We are very happy.”
