Jovani Fashion & JVN

Initial Rebuild & Support 2017-2019

Brief

We were approached due to our expertise in Web development and SEO, Jovani were having a terrible time with their current platform Joomla, which was highly modified for their niche software by an external company, upon inspecting their requirements we built a plan of what the new system would need as well as what systems would need to be hooked into their site to update pricing and style information which was coming from an external system they managed in house called N41.

Old System

Their old site was a heavily modified Joomla system, with some very heavy very poorly constructed modules, the proof of how poor was seeping to the surface in the form of very slow loading times, sometimes more than 10 seconds to load a single page. Other evidence of poor practice was evident in the fact that the system was constantly being compromised and expensive third-party protection tools were needed to try and curb the ever growing attacks to their site.

Initially they wanted us to improve the existing system, however we easily came to the conclusion that this was not feasible and WebDesires did not wish to put our name to such a system in the first place.

Upon further investigation we found the database was extremely poorly constructed, most of the data for all areas of the site sat in one flat table full of text, so any selects to the database required heavy text based searches and etc. It was evident that this system was not fit for purpose and unsalvageable. 

New Site

We had the huge task of developing 3 websites for Jovani, one would be the main Jovani site – A dresses showcase website that would provide details and high visibility photos of the Jovani catalogue. The second site was the shop for Jovani, exactly the same catalog but with pricing and checkout features and finally a independent website called JVN for their cheaper catalogue of dresses. We quickly realised that the Jovani Catalogue site and Jovani Shop would be almost identical and it would be beneficial for these two sites to be managed in one central location, so any changes by staff would reflect both sites at the same time, we ended up making a multi-store system, both sites running on the same code with one shared database.

JVN on the other hand had completely separate dresses and so this store was not tied into the other stores, we did however tie a few key elements together such as the store search and update scripts which updated all the styles and stock and prices from Jovani’s internal N41 database.

Improvements

The new system was a HUGE success in reflection to the old, the database was properly structured so the site was blazingly fast in all areas, we had a new responsive mobile design so that the site looked beautiful across a whole range of devices and screeens, the site was light-weight and SEO friendly with a proper structure and proper URLS which made the site much more indexable by Google. We also implemented full schema across all the sites including business schema, social media schema such as OG and twitter and also product schema and finally location schema for jovani’s many retailers.

We actually imported and created Jovani’s retailer / store locator from the mess of data they had from the old system, which was by no means organised and was not hooked into the N41 system (some data was missing on the website, some data was missing on the internal N41, no meaningful way to link the two apart from exact name and address probing and matching) – we built many scripts to tie relationships between the two systems so that they could relate in a proper fashion, ultimately with instructions in place for joining for the future records.

Customer Returned for New Development, Repairs & Maintenance – 2023 – Current

In 2023 Jovani contacted us and wanted us to return to the Jovani project.

Over the several years that Jovani was away from us, several external development companies had been working on the Jovani sites, causing many coding and visual issues across the site.

Our tasks over the last couple of months have been to clean up, repair and extend Jovani further into the modern era of browsers and search engines.