Anatomy of an online super store - The Garden of Beadin'
The Garden of Beadin carries a full line of colorful Japanese and Czech seed beads, Bugle and Pony Beads along with Charlotte cuts, Fire polish, sparkling Austrian Crystals, Delicas, semi-precious stones and beautiful ethnic beads. You will also find a large array of beading needles & threads, bead and beading books, clasps, earring wires and hundreds of jewelry making supplies and accessories. Nestled in the beautiful town of Garberville, in the Northwest area of the Great Redwood Forests of Humboldt County, California, The Original Garden of Beadin' is colorful stop on your way through the Redwoods.
With over 4,600 products and growing every day this ecommerce web design required a lot of fore thought and planning. We developed a custom Drupal theme, custom Drupal modules, blog, Ubercart ecommerce shopping cart, custom web forms, logo design and graphics, a Java Script slideshow banner, search engine optimization, extra security, SSL, CSS, PHP, HTML, Java Scripting, graphics and advanced hosting plan by Infinitee Web Design. Since the original store and shopping cart system was very old, obsolete and had never been upgraded in 5 years, extruding the content from the database for modern day usage had some interesting challenges. We exported what we could and copied what was usable and used the material to create a CSV import file with as much information as could be imported into a Drupal/Ubercart system. Thought this was tedious and time consuming, it was much more efficient and time saving than recreating 4,600 plus products one at a time.
Once the chunks of products, images and data were imported utilizing the Node Import and Node Import Update modules with some custom tweaking we still had to manually create attributes with multiple options for each product but, I highly recommend using the Node Import and Node Import Update modules when ever possible for massive imports of content.
Due for launch in early 2012 for general public use, The Garden of Beadin' will once again be a major supplier of beads and beading supplies for the beading community and crafters alike.
