About the Client
Ulzzang Style is an e-commerce and community website with over 2000 active members and over 400 products. ‘Ulzzang’ is a slang term for a particular type of South Korean fashion style.
Michel Bognar, who runs the site, is a long time user of rtCamp’s products. He knew we provided customization services and approached us to help build Ulzza.com.
My experience with rtCamp was very good. Always happy about the fast response.
rtCamp conducted a few discussions with Michel, where the vision and plans for Ulzza were discussed and documented. The implementation of this project required the customization of several widely-used plugins like WooCommerce, BuddyPress, rtMedia and WPML. Other objectives included:
- Creating an online presence via a community website with an attached WooCommerce store.
- Fully integrate rtCamp’s Inspirebook theme with WooCommerce, rtMedia.
- Provide multi-language support for the site via WPML.
Based on these objectives, the project was divided into the following phases.
Phase 1: Creation of a custom look for the site, with included shopping pages, price & other dynamic category filters and multi-language support.
Phase 2: Creation of WooCommerce-specific templates, addition of logic for country-specific fees and vendor registration.
Phase 3: Addition of geo-locked products, wishlist functionality, and the ability to contact sellers directly.
Project Execution
When rtCamp received the project, a version of the website was already live. Our first step was to thus set up a development environment on rtCamp’s server and sync its contents with the live site. All changes were made on the development server, and pushed to the live site at regular intervals.
After each development cycle, a review and testing phase was conducted. This was to identify and address any UI issues that might have cropped up.
Store Features
Ulzza.com required support for geo-locking some products to only Switzerland. To accomplish this, rtCamp customized the WooCommerce Vendor Stores plugin to allow vendors to specifically categorize products as “Allowed in Switzerland.” Only these products would show up to a user accessing the site from Switzerland.
The implementation of this functionality was kept extensible to allow for additional countries in the future.
rtCamp also added the following features that greatly improved the UX of the site:
- Product comparison
- Filters for products based on popularity, rating, pricing and more
- Multiple currency options
Optimizing Performance
Once the development was completed, rtCamp moved focus to site optimization.
rtCamp moved from Ulzza.com from its Apache server to Nginx to take advantage of the latter’s performance gains. We also used EasyEngine, rtCamp’s open-source server management tool, to:
- Implement server-level caching
- Set up a mail server
- Set up an SSL certificate
These and other optimizations resulted in the website loading smoothly even with over 2000 users, 400 products, and hundreds of pictures.